http://textpattern.com/?v=4.5.4Transcending the Matrix Control Systemhttp://montalk.net/
Mon, 30 Mar 2015 21:40:23 GMTSTO, STS, and Densities
Primer and exposition on the positive and negative spiritual polarities and the structure of reality.]]>

This article explains the system of “densities”, “Service-to-Self”, and “Service-to-Others” as discussed in the Ra Material and Cassiopaean Transcripts and shows how they relate to the occult concepts of the etheric and astral planes. Instead of summarizing what’s already been said, my aim here is more to provide new insights and resolve some common misunderstandings.

Why is the idea of “density” necessary?

Consider the following phenomena:

Elementary particles, such as electrons or protons, which display no sentience beyond fluctuating unpredictably at the quantum level.

Minerals, which exhibit a highly ordered structure, grow, reproduce, and can exhibit a subtle energy field.

Cryptoids such as bigfoot, mothman, men-in-black, etc. who like aliens are not fully anchored in our realm.

Ghosts, who seem no more or less intelligent than humans and are simply lacking the physical body.

Astral beings ranging from basic parasites and critters to humanoid characters of hostile or benevolent natures.

Demons, who range from imp-like minions to chthonic overlords and are the personifications of evil, antilife, antispirit, darkness, and entropy.

Angels, who are completely nonphysical and demonstrate perfect congruence with divine ethics and can surgically edit our reality if divine intervention requires it.

Higher Self, which is stationed at the end of our personal spiritual evolution and reaches back/down through time to help its past/lower projections still immersed in the human experience.

Demiurge, the pseudo-intelligent soul or quantum field of the universe that sustains physical existence as we currently know it.

Positive and negative beings, whose existence indicates that a duality exists between those who choose to assist and those who choose to exploit others.

Infinite Creator, who is infinitely sentient and both permeates all of Creation and exists timelessly beyond it.

Now, organize these phenomena into a coherent framework that shows the relation among all its parts, and do this via the simplest system possible that accounts for all those parts. What you end up with is something like the density / STO / STS system. It is not the only possible interpretation, but it’s useful and provides a working framework.

Don’t we all have the same godspark, making categorization unnecessary?

We may all be One in origin and essence, but we vary in the expression, form, function, polarity, and intensity of that fundamental spark. That is because we all have different life histories. And once lifeforms acquire self-awareness and freewill, they make different choices in response to their circumstances. So we are unified at the trunk, but diverse at the branches. We are a unified diversity, and classification is needed to better understand that diversity and the relation among its parts.

Where did this paradigm originate?

It was first delineated as such in the Law of One books, also known as the Ra Material published by L/L Research in 1981. These books are transcripts of trance channeling sessions held with a “sixth density social memory complex” that called itself Ra, who explained the concepts of density, Service-to-Self, Service-to-Others, and related topics. Many of these concepts resembled those of hermetic, gnostic, eastern, and other spiritual traditions, just stated in a more technical and complete manner.

Over a decade later, another group using an Ouija board made contact with another “sixth density social memory complex” calling itself the Cassiopaeans. The resulting Cassiopaean Transcripts (1994-2002) greatly expanded upon the Ra Material system and introduced the acronyms STS and STO.

Both channeling conduits were brought to an end by sustained attrition by dark occult forces aiming to corrupt, disrupt, or close the conduits (see Epilogue to the Law of One books and my Cassiopaea warning). Channeling is dangerous and most channeling out there is disinformation. Yet, despite the dangers of channeling, with high quality material the risks are offset by the reward of novel information that simply cannot be found in other “safer” material. For example, an academic study on the UFO phenomenon might represent the hardest proof but weakest novelty, spanning hundreds of pages but barely saying anything deep due to the timid nature of such modes of inquiry. Good channeling, on the other hand, is maximum novelty but minimum proof. The proof comes from its effectiveness when applied and tested, rather than from footnotes and citations.

But due to the inevitable presence of corruption and bias in channeled material, even with the best, one must extract from these sources the logical, relevant, and corroborative information. Doing so reveals a coherent paradigm that is fundamentally gnostic. Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Manichaeism, Buddhism, Zorostrianism, esoteric Christianity, Toltec Shamanism, etc. are variations on the same paradigm. If one does a comparative study of these, one may conclude that their otherworldly sources may be the same that inspired the Ra and Cassiopaean texts.

Below is my personal interpolation of Ra, Cassiopaean, and associated paradigms. It encompasses and goes beyond each of these, as necessitated by personal experience, the experiences of others, and the latest research. No source is sacred, no source is canon, no source is dogma. So I don’t believe in subscribing stubbornly to just one source. Truth must be extracted and assembled from various sources to build the simplest and most elegant theory explaining all that requires explaining, that continually proves itself in the face of new experiences and information.

What is a density?

It denotes a certain degree of sentience. Just as biology divides physical life into six kingdoms, so can we divide conscious life into at least seven densities. Why seven? Because that is the minimum number of classifications needed to account for the plurality of physical and nonphysical lifeforms we know about. There may be more, but there are no less.

We know that minerals are less sentient than plants, plants less sentient than animals, and average animals less sentient than average humans. So already we see there is a gradient from lower to higher sentience. Experience further shows there exist otherworldly lifeforms such as ghosts, aliens, demons, and angels who have capabilities we lack. Clearly the spectrum goes beyond the human sphere.

We can therefore extrapolate this spectrum upwards until the ultimate singularity of sentience is reached, which would by definition be the infinite Creator. Hence, between elementary matter and the infinite Creator resides a spectrum of life that can be divided into at least seven primary levels as follows:

First Density (1D) is the lowest, corresponding to subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, chemicals, and minerals, where conscious development is rudimentary and limited to simple awareness at best. Because consciousness, freewill, and nondeterminism go hand in hand, the unpredictable behavior of quantum systems (such as atoms and subatomic particles jittering nondeterministically) is due to their possessing (or being immersed in) an infinitesimal but nonzero level of consciousness, a kind of blind primordial awareness.

Second Density (2D) encompasses plant and animal life, where consciousness first experiences striving, will, passion, drive, pain, or pleasure. Examples of the lowest 2D lifeforms include plants, bacteria and fungi, whose consciousness is rudimentary. The higher 2D lifeforms begin experiencing the first inklings of freewill and self-awareness.

Third Density (3D) includes humans and other unpolished beings like us. 3D beings possess the seed of self-awareness and freewill. With these, they begin exploring their own individuality and its relation to others, and consequently they begin choosing whether to hone their individuality by helping others or by exploiting them. This process comes with a myriad of experiences and lessons accumulated over many lifetimes that hammers together their core of individuality and exalts it. As the choice of polarity solidifies and the limitations and illusions of life in 3D are overcome, a threshold is eventually reached where one has more consciousness and metaphysical energy than can be contained by the 3D realm of experience, and so one transcends to the next level.

Fourth Density (4D) includes beings that have partially transcended the limitations of space-time. They straddle the boundary between physicality and the higher nonphysical realms. Both 4D beings and their environments are part physical, part ethereal. For them, physicality is plastic and responsive to thought. Telepathy and supernatural abilities come easily. They exist behind the dimensional curtain and can project into our physical reality at will. Some are positive, others more negative. The spiritual goal of 4D existence is to achieve master of mind over matter, evolve as a cohesive society, and fully live out one’s choice of spiritual polarity.

Fifth Density (5D) is a completely nonphysical state of existence. It functions both as a stopover zone (the “afterlife”) for departed 2D/3D/4D souls and as a native realm for 5D beings who have evolved to that density after transcending 4D. The natives of 5D seem focused on accumulating wisdom and total perfection of their individuality. This is the first density that is entirely nonphysical.

Sixth Density (6D) is also completely nonphysical or ethereal, occupied by individual entities who have attained perfection as far as personal evolution is concerned, who then join with other perfected individuals to evolve together as a soul group unit. They exist as energy beings in a realm completely outside space-time. They are outside the “Matrix” so to speak.

Seventh Density(7D) is “unity with the Creator” and the total dissolution of individual existence, though not through annihilation of consciousness but achievement of infinite expansion of consciousness that permeates all life and all existence.

There are no sharp boundaries between the densities; they blend relatively smoothly like the seven colors of the light spectrum. Thus we have animals like bonobos or dolphins who might as well be 3D beings; human occult masters who have understanding and abilities that rival those of aliens; and aliens of such divinity and nonphysicality that they might as well be considered angelic light-beings.

What are STO and STS?

They are the two fundamental pathways that conscious evolution can take. They denote one’s spiritual polarity. In other articles, I prefer using the more generic terms positive and negative.

These dualities follow from the fact that 1) you are conscious, 2) your consciousness is individualized, which gives you a sense of “self”, 3) you interact with “others” who are also conscious and individualized, 4) you have the freewill to choose the relation between your “self” and these “others.” Consequently, you either choose to grow at their expense (be predator), let them grow at your expense (be prey), or grow in a way that benefits both/all/most (neither predator nor prey).

The STS or “Service to Self” path means serving self by exploiting others, but since big fish eat little fish, that also means being exploited by more powerful predators, hence STS existence also makes one prey. Thus both predator and prey comprise the STS polarity. In being predator, the system becomes unbalanced in one’s favor. In being prey, it becomes unbalanced in others’ favor. Either state is one of imbalance where a part of the system suffers and hence the whole system suffers from not being in its most optimal and efficient state where the greatest evolution for the greatest number of beings may occur.

But the STO pathway is beyond that predator-prey dynamic. As an STO being, you would be cognizant (and directly perceptive, rather than merely taking it on faith) of the fact that all is One, that by helping others you are helping the “you” in “them.” You would work toward the maximization of energy, growth, freewill, awareness, and power of everyone including yourself, in a balanced and harmonious way. This is not just an intellectual “going through the motions,” but a free-spirited expression of the love, empathy, wisdom, and liveliness that wells up from the true and permanent core of sentience within you, also known as spirit.

In this way, you are helping the system as a whole, bringing it toward greater efficiency and efficacy in moving conscious evolution forward toward ever-greater congruence with the infinite Creator, thereby helping the Creator achieve self-realization. The impulse to accomplish this comes from the spirit (divine intelligence) within, and so the feedback loop between internal and external/transcendent Creator is thereby closed.

STO bears some similarity to “light”, “divine”, and “good”, while STS relates to “dark”, “infernal”, “evil.” But unlike the latter terms, there is no moralistic, relativistic, subjective, “because my religion said so” dimension to it. Rather it follows logically from such concepts as freewill, self, other, and conscience/empathy or lack thereof, which are universal and self-evident concepts from which we each can identify, confirm, and draw conclusions. Thus properly defined, the terms STO and STS avoid the many pitfalls of the vaguer subjective terms.

The phrase “helping another” is also cause for confusion. The problem arises when people don’t differentiate between the lower and higher parts of another person. They are unaware which of the two they are actually helping and thereby growing or exacerbating. Are they worsening another’s STS tendencies through this help? Or are they facilitating another’s spiritual empowerment and awakening? They think help has to be blind and unconditional, in their minds incorrectly meaning without discernment or discretion. That only ends in heartbreak, loss, and burnout. Nor do they recognize when a person is thoroughly under the control of his or her lower aspect and cannot be helped at this point in their evolution. Love must be fortified with wisdom; otherwise one ends up as prey, which is STS.

How is this not dualistic thinking?

It is dualistic, but for good reason. Freewill is the ability to choose, and choice requires at least two genuine options. The two most fundamental, profound, and enduring options are whether to observe, honor, and support the divine spark within all, or to disregard and act against it. And thus are born the STO and STS pathways. To believe in freewill is to admit the potential duality of its expression.

STO and STS comprise a legitimate duality, perhaps the only one. There are plenty of false dichotomies, all of them existing within the STS realm where illusion, deception, manipulation, and ignorance are the norm. It is right to call these out as dangerous forms of dualistic thinking. But don’t let these examples lead to the erroneous conclusion that all dualism is false. Discerning between real duality and false dichotomies is important.

There may be one genuine duality, but it has been imitated by numerous illusory ones. To throw out the genuine along with the imitation is a straw man fallacy and a win for the STS Matrix Control System. Example: rejecting religious moralism in favor of moral relativism, and in the process ignoring the higher objective ethical framework beyond both. Likewise, to accept the imitation along with the genuine is also a win for the Matrix. For example, believing that certain religious, political, or social norms are expressions of absolute good.

What exactly is meant by “self”, considering there is more to our being than just our everyday mundane self?

This is a matter of semantics, so we have to clear up the definitions. The key to solving this is that technically there are at least three selves: 1) the Higher Self (of which you are an independent and self-aware projection), 2) the middle self (you reading this now), and 3) the baser self (also known as the “shadow”, which Jung calls the “id”, Castaneda the “predator”, and generally speaking is the sum total of your biological and social programming, negative entity attachments, and negative subconscious complexes).

When talking about the Higher Self and lower self, the definition of “lower self” depends on what it’s relative toward. If it’s you compared to your Higher Self, then you are technically its lower self. But the baser self is lower than even you. So the phrase “I will not give in to my lower self” is said from the middle self regarding the baser self, while “the lower self must align with the Higher Self” is said from the middle relative to the higher.

Further, the ego in the original Jung/Freudian sense simply means “the me” which would mean your middle self, a.k.a. you. However, when we say that someone is being egotistical, or that we must conquer the ego, we’re really talking about the baser self being overactive and needing to be reigned in. So “ego” can mean either the middle or baser self, depending on context.

So when STO and STS refer to self and other, this “self” refers mainly to the middle self, the one that is incarnate, consciously thinking, acting, choosing, and growing as an individual.

This middle self has the option of choosing in favor of the Higher Self or the baser self, typically stated as choosing between spirit or ego. Ego in that context means the baser self, the “other, within” — basically the devil on your shoulder. You can’t serve the baser self by serving others. You can only serve your middle and Higher Self by serving others, because only these get anything out of that. The baser self is strictly a predatory/parasitic/mechanical thing and the source of STS impulses.

What about Service-to-All?

This concept was invented by those who misinterpret STS and STO as meaning predator and prey. They view “Service-to-All” or STA as being the transcendent, balanced, and neutral alternative to that dichotomy. STA is based on the misconception that Service to Others means “serving only others, while ignoring self,” such as being a doormat or ascetic who is weak and neglectful of his or her own well-being. By neglecting yourself, you handicap your future ability to do good, thereby decreasing your total positive impact and increasing imbalance, which is STS.

Properly defined, STO means serving self through serving others in a balanced way that is of maximum spiritual benefit to all. It means being neither predator nor prey. It does not mean being a doormat, nor neglecting personal well-being to the point of interfering with one’s future ability to serve, which is a shortsighted form of martyrdom. So what some define as STA is already the correct definition of STO, therefore the term STA is unnecessary. What they call STO is actually the prey component of the STS predator-prey dynamic. Therefore, instead of [STA (neutral transcendent) | STO (prey) | STS (predator)] it should be [STO (neutral transcendent) | STS (prey vs. predator)].

The difficulty with treading the STO path is that it involves maximization of energy balance and freewill in a system, and supporting this balance requires an intelligent exercise of freewill to consistently hit the sweet spot for any given situation. To balance a broomstick is hard, while letting it fall is easy. Being STS is easy because no genuine spiritual intelligence is needed to be a passive lump being preyed upon, or to give into reactive behavior and let yourself fall under Matrix influences into animalistic or demonic states.

The only daily challenge STS predators have is in being cunning and watching their own backs. The irony is that every STS predator is prey to a bigger STS predator except the one at the very top of the food chain, and even that entity is perilously close to collapsing under the weight of its own darkness. Thus to be STS means to be both predator and prey.

We humans are 3D STS and we are preyed upon by more powerful 3D STS humans (criminals, international bankers, negative secret societies, psychopathic corporations, etc.) who themselves are fodder for 4D and 5D STS beings who prey upon them as well as us. Meanwhile, we eat plants and animals, who eat even lower lifeforms. That is the STS food chain.

STO beings are outside that food chain, ideally neither feeding on us nor contributing to the amount of imbalance in the system. They follow the dictum: do no harm. This they observe to the best of their ability, and that ability increases the higher the density.

How do densities relate to the STS and STO concept?

The higher the density, the more intense and pure the expression of STS and STO archetypes. That is because as consciousness grows in power, intelligence, energy, sophistication, understanding, perception, and love of self / others, the complexity and scope of what it can do likewise increases. Thus it is able to better express the STS or STO archetype.

The choice to align as an individual with the STS or STO pathway begins in 3D due to this being the level where self-awareness, freewill, and thus self-determination first arise. Up to that point, one simply acts according to one’s nature as predetermined by physics, chemistry, biology, and occult factors.

This brings up an interesting point, though, which is that the STS and STO archetypes are reflected even in 1Dand 2D, at least in rudimentary ways. For example, among the elements some are more lifegiving and noble, others more poisonous and disintegrative.

Compare oxygen and uranium, for instance. Oxygen is an important component in biologies. Uranium meanwhile is not essential to life; instead it is an unstable element whose decay is a pure expression of entropy. By destroying DNA, its radiation knocks down what evolution has built up. Wilhelm Reich, who experimented with orgone (etheric) energy, found that ionizing radiation turned healthy orgone into deadly orgone. Likewise, clairvoyants can sense differences among the auric energies of various minerals, some having a vitalizing and healing effect, and others an interfering, discombobulating, or lowering effect.

In early 2D, some plants are harmless and live in balance with nature, even providing nourishment and thus supporting life. Others are poisonous, parasitic, predatory, and generally dangerous. Fungi, bacteria, insects, and animals likewise polarize into a spectrum from the archetypally more positive to the more negative.

So you could say that every species is representative of an archetype, and that archetype is closer toward the STS or STO end of the spectrum. This is explained by an occult perspective whereby every 2D species actually has a group oversoul that exists as an individualized 3D persona in the astral plane (with which shamans interact, like when they talk about communicating with the spirit of a particular plant or animal species) and this persona is what is polarized more toward STS or STO.

Now, there is a natural order to our world whereby everything that lives must eat. Some forms of eating are more STS than others. Eating low on the food chain is less STS, but there is a limit dictated by biology. Obviously we cannot live by eating dirt, and so we must eat plants. But even fruits and plants don’t always provide sufficient nutrition, so we may require animal products as well to the extent that our personal genetics and lifestyles demand; some people do well on a vegetarian or vegan diet, some do not, and some are in denial about how poorly they are faring on an inappropriate diet. Note that killing or impairing oneself through malnutrition, on the assumption that one is sparing life, is actually an STS act when the resulting tiredness, loss of clarity, and illness keeps you from doing the novel and positive things you came here to do; in that case, there is a net loss in the growth of the system. Therefore the final tally, the big picture, the long-term consequences are what ultimately determine the value.

In eating, a life is taken (or denied, as in the case of eating a fruit or seed) to serve oneself. The natural order is that higher eats lower. That is the STS food chain as allowed within the divine framework to the extent that it supports life. Lower is sacrificed to advance the evolution of the higher, hence the system as a whole progresses toward a higher state. As long as the higher uses that nutrition to output an equal or greater amount of novelty in the system than was taken through eating, there is negative entropy and hence a net gain overall.

The problem is when lower eats or harms higher and retards evolution, thereby slowing or inverting the natural order. Only the most archetypally STS of 1D and 2D forms exhibit this trait. There is a fascinating phenomenon in demonology where certain lifeforms tend to pop up synchronistically when there is a demonic presence around. We are all familiar with Beelzebub’s association with flies. Centipedes, poisonous snakes and spiders, cockroaches, scorpions, mold, ant swarms, and wasps are better examples.

What is it that sets these apart from other lifeforms including predators like lions, which don’t seem to have a demonic association? The answer is that these are lower lifeforms of a poisonous or predatory nature that have the ability to harm something much higher on the evolutionary ladder, and often do so without mercy or discretion. How is that any different from what demons do? Hence the archetypal resonance between the two, and why one often accompanies the other. Physical lifeforms associated with conditions of cold, damp, death, decay, disease, putrefaction, and darkness are mirrors (as above, so below) of the demonic hierarchy doing likewise at the etheric and astral levels. Demons are vibrationally lower beings who seek to poison our consciousness and feed off the decay of our spirit.

So, even though the individual STS and STO paths begin in 3D, enter their sublime expressions in 4D, and attain perfection in 5D, they still have their mirroring resonances in 1D and 2D, just that life at those densities lacks the self-determination needed to embody those paths at the individual and freely chosen level. In 6D, STO beings have moved beyond individual evolution toward evolving further in soul groups.

6D STS beings don’t exist except as a harmonic overtone of the collective consciousness of STS beings in the lower densities. In other words, STS exists in 6D only as an archetypal thoughtform, an impression stamped into the etheric and astral substrate, a malicious command injected into the program known as existence, an artificial intelligence that carries out its given directives — this I have termed the “Corrupt Demiurge” in my Gnosis articles. More on that subject below.

How do densities relate to the physical dimensions (length, width, height, time)?

Higher densities can access a higher dimension beyond ours, lower densities can only access the lower dimensions familiar to us. That’s as far as the relation seems to go.

Obviously rocks, plants, animals, and humans interact with each other with full tangibility and zero ambiguity, so at least on Earth, the first three densities are all mired in the same linear time and three dimensions of space. They all have bodies anchored to spacetime.

4D beings such as aliens, however, have demonstrated the ability to access a fourth dimension (or the fifth, if you count time as the fourth dimension). Through this higher dimension they can phase themselves in and out of our timeline, slip through solid walls, travel through time, slide between timelines, and view the probable events of our past, present, and future simultaneously as though spread out like a tableau. 5D and 6D beings can do likewise, just with greater fidelity and without the aid of technology.

So despite their differences, the first three densities occupy the same three-dimensional space. And although fourth density is associated with the fourth dimension, that does not mean Fifth Density can access the fifth dimension, or Sixth Density the sixth dimension, or Seventh the seventh.

If densities signify degree of conscious evolution, then what does it mean to “be in Fourth Density” or “be in Fifth Density”?

This has to do with the fact that lifeforms of various densities exist in various corresponding environments owing to the limitations or powers of their consciousness.

Beings of the first three densities on Earth inhabit a completely physical environment while they are incarnate. Since 3rd Density humans live a physical life, sometimes it’s convenient to make 3rd Density synonymous with physicality or third-dimensional existence, since for humans one implies the other. Therefore to “be in 3rd Density” can mean being here in this physical realm.

Similarly, 4D beings exist in a variably quasi-physical / quasi-ethereal environment owing to their greater conscious development and/or technology that affords them access to the dimension beyond space-time. This state comes with its own principles and environmental characteristics different from ours (more of an extension or superset). Thus to “be in Fourth Density” means to exist in that quasi-physical realm. The same goes for 5D beings, whose existence takes places in a completely ethereal or metaphysical environment that may be called Fifth Density as well.

So strictly speaking, there are only three major types of environments: physical, quasi-physical, and nonphysical. But for reasons explained above, these can be termed 3rd, 4th, and 5th/6th Density as a matter of convenience due to one usually implying the other.

That said, it is important to distinguish between density as a measure of consciousness, and density as a signifier of environment. While the two correlate, they are not permanently locked together. For example, it’s possible for a 3rd Density entity to “be in 5th Density,” as happens after death when a human enters the afterlife. Here we mean a 3D consciousness entering a nonphysical environment. Since that environment is normally the native realm of entities that have achieved 5th Density consciousness, we can say that the afterlife takes place “in 5th Density”. But that doesn’t mean a deceased human is a 5D being in terms of conscious evolution. He’s just a visitor in the “visitor area” of 5th Density.

Likewise, a 4D lifeform can enter a 3D environment, which simply means he/she/it becomes physical. And a 3D human can be brought up into 4D, say via an abduction or perhaps entering an underground military base that has been technologically shifted into a “sideband” of reality via displacement along the fourth dimension.

What is Fourth Density like, precisely?

No precise answer can be given. We either don’t know because we haven’t personally experienced it, or we have experienced 4D but cannot access those memories in our current state of consciousness, or we can remember but cannot put it into words, or we can put it into words that make sense to us won’t be understood by a reader who lacks the proper experiential context.

But that doesn’t prevent us from making an approximation based on several clues:

1) What the Ra and Cassiopaean sources have said regarding Fourth Density, as well as what aliens themselves have told or shown people.

2) What abductees and contactees have observed of the capabilities, behaviors, mistakes, technologies, tendencies, and limitations of alien and shadow military abductors.

3) The so-called “Oz Factor” surrounding abductions and contacts, such as temporal discontinuities, warping of space, change in the ambiance of the local environment, or altered states of consciousness and perception.

4) Fortean phenomena as investigated by Jacques Vallee and John Keel among others, which demonstrate that aliens are not constrained by our known laws of physics and that one’s consciousness is a key variable affecting the probability and nature of human-alien interaction.

5) What folklore, mythology, religion, and occult traditions have said regarding non-human beings, their technology, their habitats, the laws or principles by which they operate, or their capabilities and limitations.

6) What can be extrapolated from exotic physics fields concerning complex spacetime, ultra relativity (what is beyond space-time), holographic reality, quantum phase and gauge freedom, and what quantum physics experiments have yielded concerning probable futures and probable pasts interacting with each other. These scientific discoveries point the way to understanding the nature of hyperdimensional beings and technology.

7) Anecdotes of shamans, spiritual masters, and alchemists throughout history who succeeded in transcending 3D limitations.

8) That the line between 3D and 4D is blurred, meaning we can already experience faint versions of 4D principles and phenomena. An example is reality creation, i.e., using your mind to attract certain probable futures. By extrapolating these early stirrings of 4D, we can determine what must be the norm in 4D.

From the above, we can easily conclude there is more to existence than the everyday material world of our five senses. For us, time seems to move in a linear direction at a steady rate, we are limited to three dimensions of space, the speed of light is constant, gravity cannot be manipulated nor can time, and most people have never witnessed major anomalies that make them question their reality. But anomalies do happen and they represent cracks in the façade of this illusion. The implication: maybe what is the exception in our world is the rule in another.

4D is a superset of 3D, like how the complex plane in mathematics is a superset of the real number line (there is more truth to this than the analogy implies). So if we are confined to the real number line, they have access to the entire complex plane. In other words, they have access to a higher dimension.

What we have (matter, energy, space, time, bodies) they have, but unlike us they are not bound to having only that. 4D is not a diaphanous nonphysical existence; it is very real and tangible in its own way, just different from ours in that beings there also have access to etheric perception, etheric technology, and etheric manipulation; also they are not hampered by the rigid constancy of time and space. To such beings, matter and energy are amenable to manipulation by the mind. Reality is more fluid, variable, malleable, and selective there.

They have a deep understanding that matter and consciousness are the same thing at the root. The illusion separating the two is smaller there than here. In 4D, matter appears to be more deeply charged and impregnated with consciousness and etheric lifeforce energy, so everything there has more vibrancy and intensity than our anemic “desert of the real”.

4D has space but is not restricted to just the three spatial dimensions. It has time, but is not restricted to linear time. If a 4D being wishes to experience time linearly, it can. If it wishes to confine itself to a three-dimensional environment, it can. If it chooses the time and space in such a way that it matches ours, then that is the method by which it projects itself into our 3D environment.

To show up at your front door for dinner, such a being would have to use its mind or technology (usually both) to synchronize its time rate, timeline, moment in time, and position in space with the target point. Or it can opt to show up invisibly simply by staying slightly phased out (displaced along the fourth dimension) instead of fully locking phase with our reality. Hanging back like this keeps them from suffering the side-effects (energy leakage and loss) of becoming fully physical in our environment. When they project fully into 3D, they become 3D beings for their duration here; if they stay too long, their 4D awareness can slip away and they risk getting stuck.

Due to the malleability of physicality in 4D, concepts such as left and right, forward and backward, here and there, past and future — these are more or less variable, their validity depending on how tightly a 4D being (or group of them establishing a mutual environment) can focus and hold these concepts in place. Without that focus, things take on a more “Alice in Wonderland” tone. If through black ops technology or some natural anomaly a human were thrust into 4D without mental training or some technology to stabilize him, he would probably be caught in a kaleidoscopic fluid reality and lose his mind, like how the poor sailors of the alleged Philadelphia Experiment, at least the ones who escaped getting embedded in the walls or bursting into flames, went insane.

The reason these illusions of space and time define our existence here is that they are the chalk and chalkboard upon which we learn our 3D lessons. These restrictions are what allow the kinds of dramas, challenges, and triumphs we experience as humans. They are the medium or matrix of our growth. But they are not permanent fetters, anymore than a five pound dumbbell is a permanent training tool for a bodybuilder. In 4D, the restrictions of 3D space and linear time have served their purpose and are no longer the primary framework for the catalysts of evolution, but they can be invoked as needed, same way we can invoke arithmetic even if we know algebra or draw stick figures even if we can paint.

Similarly, whereas average animals and lower humans learn through physical pleasure and pain, higher humans can also learn through emotional, psychological, and spiritual pain and joy; life in 4D hinge more on the latter as learning catalysts versus physical pain, illness, and suffering that defines life in the 2D/3D jungle.

When a particular 4D incarnation has reached its length and grows tired, the being dies, goes to 5th density for recuperation and contemplation of its life, and then is born again into 4th density to begin a new life. Thus reincarnation still exists in 4D, but how it happens varies depending on whether one is early 4D or upper 4D; the latter, where mind has achieved greater mastery over matter, may not require birth into an infant body, but instead the body could be directly precipitated using the power of thought.

Instead of being reborn as a 4D infant, one could (if allowed) choose to be born into 3D as a human baby, which is what the Ra Material calls a “Wanderer”; that is, someone from a higher density who incarnates in a lower. Or the incoming soul could take over the body of someone whose soul agrees to leave (or is forcibly removed), this being known as the “Walk-In” phenomenon. In 3D, a higher density soul would be encumbered with typical 3D limitations, but something of their 4D mindset and mission remains, even if only subconsciously. Perhaps that allows them to advance their 4D cause from the inside and accomplish here what they could not from the outside (this has to do with laws of non-interference).

Much of individual development in 4D revolves around training the mind, body, and spirit to achieve greater metaphysical abilities to be applied in all areas; for instance, being able to project oneself into 3D requires a higher level of consciousness mastery, and so organized training exists in 4D to teach and develop that skill among others. Shortcomings in mental abilities can be compensated by technology, thus it is the less evolved 4D groups who rely more heavily on technology.

4D beings are telepathic, some more than others. While they can speak in words if they need to, telepathy is how they normally communicate because it is much higher in bandwidth and fidelity, like high definition video versus smoke signals. They can read our minds like open books since we have no familiarity with telepathy and thus have not put in place any psychic safeguards against being monitored. They can also write to our minds to varying degrees depending on our level of mindlessness, suggestibility, or psychic sensitivity. Additionally, they can perceive etheric energy and thus can both observe and manipulate our aura or etheric body, through which they can mentally induce paralysis, heal or sicken, induce emotions or take them away, induce pain or numb it, and enhance consciousness or knock it out.

As for the visual appearance of 4th Density beings, since they don’t have 100% control over their environment or bodies (only partial) they are still influenced by the genetics of their second and third density ancestry. So a fourth density being whose ancestry included humanoids like us, will look humanoid in 4D as well. If they evolved or were genetically engineered from reptilians or insects, then likewise they will have those characteristics. This is in contrast to 5D, where consciousness has grown so powerful that it can project/dissolve a custom body as needed.

Yet, despite the external resemblance, the specific genetic coding and structure, physiology, organ structure and placement, and the chemical makeup of the 4D body is not necessarily identical to its 3D ancestry. That is due not only to them having advanced genetically, or having modified themselves artificially, but because matter in 4D operates by an expanded superset of physics and is more enlivened or enriched by consciousness and lifeforce energy. Hence, more is possible there in terms of what types of biological processes (just as with their technological processes) can arise, and so that leads to some differences in the function and structure of the body as well.

For example, a 4D nordic alien may resemble a 3D human enough to walk among us without turning too many heads, but anyone like a doctor looking more closely would be perplexed. Their dietary requirements would not be the same as ours either. We require thousands of calories, lots of protein and carbs and fats and fiber and most of it leaves as waste, which speaks to the inefficiency of our digestive systems. Meanwhile, they could get away with much less. Some reports describe them eating jello-like foods, broths, and crystalline beads that they demolecularize and absorb straight into their bodies. The type of food and method probably depends on their genetics and degree of mind-over-matter mastery.

Due to their being psychic and having a highly energized etheric body, 4D beings are not divided within themselves in the sense of having a higher, middle, and lower self all cut off from each other, or having different personas wrestling over the steering wheel of the mind as humans regularly do. We are only in that condition because our etheric energy levels are so low, and our etheric circuitry so inactive or latent, that the different parts of our being are not connected by the necessary communication linkages. So the 4D mind, soul, and body is comparatively more whole, interconnected, harmonious within itself. In the STO mode, this includes an active uplink with the spirit or Higher Self. In the 4D STS mode, it is only the middle self merged with the demonic energies of the baser self that guide action; or if no middle self, then a hive mind, external demonic influence, or external proxy control by forces higher up in the STS food chain.

Likewise, because such beings are telepathic and can perceive the “vibes” of others, 4D societies are not divided within themselves like ours are. Due to our psychic blindness and inability to quickly understand another person from the inside out, we remain relatively disconnected and disorganized except through commonly enculturated beliefs and lifestyles. But if you could know your neighbor as deeply as your own mind and vice versa, you wouldn’t need years of friendship and countless hours of discussion to come to some equilibrium or harmonization of your standing and understanding with each other.

Now apply this to an entire society. 4D beings are connected telepathically to others who are compatible with them, and so a spontaneous type of psychic network emerges whereby all individuals, without losing their individuality, understand and harmonize with each other into a more organized, cohesive, and connected whole. This is what the Ra material calls a “social memory complex.”

4D STO and STS are of different vibration, different goals, different orientations. Normally they don’t interact with each other, let alone bump into each other in 4D (middle and higher 4D especially). From our perspective, they might as well be on different realities or timelines. That is because in not being locked into one instance of spacetime, they can segregate onto separate ones, similar to how walkie talkie communications can be assigned to different channels. One group of friends chooses one channel, another chooses another. We 3D beings, meanwhile, are generally locked onto one channel with everyone talking on top of everyone else and wars breaking out as a result.

Of course, in practice this isn’t so black and white and is actually more a matter of degree, since by changing our own thoughts and feelings we can do something similar just in a weaker sense, more along the lines of probability bending and thus manifesting for ourselves a future that keeps us from running into people and situations that don’t fit that vibe or mindset. Just that in 4D, this is taken to a whole other level and is the default mode of operation.

However, when 4D STO and 4D STS concern themselves with 3D affairs like the fate of our planet and whether humans should be exploited as a resource or nurtured toward spiritual maturity, or if some abductee or contactee is of vital interest to both, then these 4D groups collide and are forced to interact over such matters, be it via collaboration, diplomacy, or fighting. Thus it’s not so much that STO and STS fight each other directly in 4D (although they can) but rather that they fight over us and through us. In fact, you could say that our history, our reality, and in some cases our own lives are largely the reflections/products of conflicting interactions between higher density forces.

As the Ra Material explained, the main goal of 4th Density social memory complexes is to exercise and thus develop their STO and STS natures by reaching out to less polarized (that means us) civilizations and catalyzing their polarization toward greater STO or STS, in accordance with the individual and collective freewill of those civilizations. What the STS forces get is more food, energy, resources, and slaves/recruits. What the STO groups receive is the learning, growth, and satisfaction that comes with looking out for their spiritually younger siblings.

What about the reported shift in consciousness that occurs when you enter a 4th or 5th Density environment, is that the same as becoming a 4th or 5th Density being?

If you were to take the soul of the average animal and give it a human body, it would now have access to the human intellect and be able to learn how to speak and function in society. With an upgrade in biology comes new tools, in this case physical/neurological ones. However, this humanimal would be a rudimentary human with no wisdom under its belt, no higher spiritual priorities, and would likely be preoccupied with personal survival and reproduction because that is all the soul has known so far. Thus it would experience an altered state of consciousness due to a different body and better brain, but at the core it would remain a 2D being.

Likewise, when a purely 3D human is brought into 4D via abduction, psychic, or technological means, he would experience an altered state of consciousness but remain 3D at the core. The change in consciousness comes mostly from an upgrade in his etheric body circuitry, due to etheric currents being shifted and heightened within him, which in turn is due to the 4D environment being denser with such energies. This etheric activation enables certain psychic functions that allow bypassing some of the limitations of the physical brain. He or she would feel lighter, more alive, be able to comprehend much deeper and wider thoughts, and be able to perceive and remember things that otherwise are inaccessible.

But until he lives there for a long time and learns the gamut of lessons unique to 4D existence, he would remain a 3D being at the core. And when he is brought back to 3D and his etheric energy subdues back down to base levels, all of that fades away and he might even forget his experiences there, for they were perceived and recorded in a portion of his being other than the physical brain into which he is now locked.

Similarly, if a 4D being incarnates into a 3D human form, or projects itself down into 3D and becomes fully physical for far too long, the 3D environment and laws of physics would begin impeding this being’s formerly high caliber abilities. Like a plant cut off from light, it may enter a kind of spiritual sleep, a kind of stupor or amnesia. In a sense, a former ‘god’ becomes a mere ‘mortal.’ At their core, they will still be 4D but they will now be subject to the entropy, inertia, and handicaps typical of 3D environments and bodies.

And when a person dies and goes to the 5D afterlife, in being freed from the restrictions of biology, linear time, and space, he would now have an expanded level of perception but still only have 3D experiences and wisdom gathered at the core of his being, with more to acquire in further 3D lifetimes.

Now, the tricky part is that not every human is necessarily a 3D soul. If a 4D soul incarnates as a human (say, as part of a humanitarian mission) then if this person were brought into 4D during an abduction, he would return to his former self during his stay there, instead of merely being augmented with foreign abilities. In fact, these abilities might feel familiar. (Higher density beings who incarnate here into 3rd Density are termed “Wanderers” in the Ra Material, “Systems Busters” in Bringers of the Dawn, and “Helper Souls” in my book Fringe Knowledge for Beginners).

Similarly, when a 5D being incarnates as a human and later dies, its entrance into 5D density is not merely a temporary sitting down at the sidelines in between incarnations, but a return home to the nonphysical realm it natively inhabited before coming here.

So there is a difference between having your consciousness altered into something unnatural to your level of evolution, versus having handicaps lifted and returning to your true self in that higher density.

If STO serves others, does that include allowing themselves to be abused by STS who selfishly demand to be served?

No, because that creates further imbalance. To help the wrong person, in the wrong way, the wrong time, or for the wrong reasons is to harm. To feed STS in a manner that clearly exacerbates or enables their STS tendencies is to increase the total imbalance of the system, making that an STS act, one that arises from lack of understanding and foresight. This creates negative consequences such as draining of energy, time, health, life, and resources and leads to inevitable regret once the damage is done and realized.

This is a difficult but necessary lesson to all who are progressing in an STO direction but are still in contact with STS environments and beings. People who are loving, compassionate, and kind but who lack strength, discernment, and wisdom will encounter human and non-human predators who initiate some very painful learning lessons. Higher feelings are not enough, one also needs higher intelligence, for the higher aspect of one’s being has both a higher heart and a higher mind. In other words, the higher emotional and higher intellectual centers must both be actualized to secure an STO state.

Keep in mind that as humans, despite our good intentions, we are still 3D STS beings. That means we exist in an STS realm and are therefore in direct contact with other STS forces. It also means we are running on finite energy, time, and resources. That is why we can encounter abusers in the first place, and why we get burned trying to help them. In turn, that is why we also need strength, discernment, and wisdom to navigate through these obstacles. These higher intellectual qualities can only be gained by immersion in the STS realm and confrontation with its forces and pitfalls. This fact was encoded in the myth of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and being expelled into the Wilderness, where that knowledge could be acquired.

Compared to our difficulty in dealing with other STS individuals and beings, things are different for higher density STO. First, they are not limited in energy, time, or resources like we are, therefore they can give more of themselves without suffering imbalance as a result. Angels don’t have to sleep eight hours a day, feed their children, or betray their integrity to make ends meet. To be STO means to be free from the constraints that define life in the Matrix. It is inner spiritual freedom that leads to outer freedom, not vice versa.

Second, beings in the higher densities are not as crammed together and tangible to each other as they are here in 3D. Here, a good hearted person and a nasty thug — each in their own realm or mode of living — are equally physical to each other, and sometimes paths cross and there is a murder. In 3D, both are physical and only the probability of physical interaction is influenced in the sense that karmic and soul resonance factors can sway whether the paths cross in the first place, or whether synchronistic factors prevent the intersection of their circumstances. But synchronicity aside, randomness and the law of the jungle also exist, and sometimes violations happens just because they can and someone chose to violate.

But in higher densities, realms are separated by “frequency,” somewhat like different stations on the radio spectrum. Two separate realms might be intangible to each other, just as one radio station is not heard on another. In higher densities, STO beings cross paths with STS beings by choice, not by force as is our case where humans share the same physical environment.

Note that there are plenty of anecdotes of divine forces “coming down” to deal with demons or pluck someone in a near death experience out from the lower astral realms, so it’s not like STO beings by virtue of their soul resonance differences cannot ever enter an STS realm. They can and do when necessary. However, as mentioned earlier, STS seemingly cannot enter the STO realm, for they cannot make it far before they lose their energy and cohesion upon encountering the higher vibratory energies. Therefore higher density STO don’t have to worry about defending themselves as much as we do.

Third, higher density beings have spiritual powers that allow them to read one’s mind and soul. Therefore they are not easy to trick. A selfish man begging “God” for petty victories and vain successes can be read like an open book, and the only beings who answer his prayers are STS forces who have a Faustian bargain to offer. In contrast, humans who lack telepathic powers — and sometimes even simple intuition — can be fooled by a charming scammer who then proceeds to bleed them dry financially.

Therefore higher density STO endure no constant risk of being abused by STS. We, on the other hand, must make up for our 3rd Density limitations with strength, discernment, and wisdom. We must understand that not everyone returns kindness with kindness or respect with respect; some people, as well as demons and negative aliens, see our kindness and respect as weaknesses to exploit. There is no sense in sacrificing oneself to these predators, as it only increases imbalance.

Does that mean STO never helps STS?

No. We are fundamentally STS, and yet STO beings do help us sometimes. Higher STO forces can help STS beings if doing so increases the total balance in the system. How is that possible? Because not all STS beings are 100% STS, meaning some still have a part of them potentially resonant with STO impulses.

It’s possible for someone to beSTS yet be moving towardSTO. Position versus velocity. Thus we must differentiate between the state of being STS or STO, and the direction of change toward becoming more STS or STO.

One can have STS qualities, but less so than other people, and less with each passing day. Perhaps one’s altruistic motives still have elements of selfishness, but if one’s intentions and actions result in increasing balance in the world, in enabling greater awareness in the uninformed and freewill in the oppressed, then that carries a net gain in the cause of service to others.

When higher density STO help such people, it is done with the aim of increasing total balance, awareness, and freewill. Thus some peripheral STS tendencies can be overlooked if the STO-directed aspects of a person prevail in a given situation and its outcome. It would be these latter aspects that are assisted.

We can and should do likewise when helping others, since indiscriminate enabling of their baser impulses decreases balance, awareness, and freewill overall. A person’s baser self is essentially an externally grafted parasite holding the middle and higher self hostage. By feeding the hostage taker, one is working against that person’s true self. Thus respect for freewill requires discriminating between the lower and upper aspects of a person and not indulging their lower impulses.

Do higher STO ever work with higher STS?

Since the STS mode of existence comes with a deep seated ignorance and denial of one’s true nature and place within the divine framework, it’s doubtful that STS forces fully understand the STO way of thinking and being. They might be aware of the existence of STO groups, but perceive them as an intimidating enigma to be reckoned with. At worst, they view the STO forces as an annoyance or serious threats depending on how much their activities interfere with their own.

There seems to be a mutual understanding between them, however, that each has its jurisdiction and purpose. Conflict only arises when jurisdictions are perceived to be violated, or when circumstances only allow mutually exclusive courses of action to be taken that can only benefit one side, or when one encroaches upon the goals of the other. Otherwise, each generally acts independently.

It also depends on the density level. At the upper levels, the vibrational difference between STS and STO is so wide that it’s unlikely that the highest of angels would ever interact with the most chthonic of demonic overlords at the bottom most astral levels. This, versus lower 4D where STS and STO alien groups are not as vibrationally distant and, due to having etheric and physical bodies, may sometimes encounter each other in those environments. In 3D, we are all physical and it’s only geographic separation and good behavior that keep us apart.

If a region like North America is under STS alien and black ops jurisdiction, then unauthorized STO activities here that directly undermine their agenda is treated as a threat. Shadow military using alien technology shoot down STO crafts for that reason, all the while working directly with the STS alien factions that control them or give mutual materiel support. If an STO alien group wishes to operate here, they would either have to do it covertly or with permission, and the latter comes with strings attached. Permission would be granted if there is potential gain for presiding STS authorities. In rare circumstances, this may include working with them, or working directly under their supervision.

Naturally, the outcome of such arrangements is never a done deal. There is no guarantee of the desired outcome, only a risk of loss and possibility of gain that cannot be acquired any other way. In other words, STS and STO can interact in a seemingly cooperative fashion but really it’s a gamble most of the time.

For example, consider the case of a certain person who has come under the concern of demons and angels. The demons, being what they are, seek to feed off the disintegration of his soul, while the angels normally protect him from such paranormal meltdown. Then let’s say part of his destiny is to become a writer and teacher on the subject of demons. He cannot do this without experiencing them directly. So the angels withdraw their protection enough to allow him to experience their influence, with the potential outcome that he will overcome the challenge and grow knowledgeable, strong, and wise concerning their nature and methods of operation. But that outcome isn’t guaranteed. He could, by his own choice to indulge in his vices when nudged by these demons, descend into alcoholism, perversion, depression, violence, or illness, suicide, and eventual death. The demons need not even know of the gamble being taken; they might only see that the target is wide open and then, being opportunists, jump at the chance. In that case, an STS force carries out its agenda not knowing that it’s unwittingly serving a positive ends provided the person(s) enduring their attacks play their part and make it through in one piece.

So it’s not usually STO and STS working together in the sense of old friends having tea and playing chess, or one playing good cop and the other bad cop while behind the scenes they are buddies, but rather STS carrying out its psychopathic agenda while STO allows, cooperates, or makes concessions on the slim chance that it could backfire on the STS forces and bring about a more positive outcome than otherwise achievable had that gamble never been taken. STO forces, in being aligned with the divine will and not being blinded by the denial, ignorance, and delusion of the STS pathway, can see outcomes that the STS cannot. Therefore they (or rather the divine intelligence they are serving) are given to using the little things like synchronicity or butterfly effect to confound and ultimately throw the best laid plans of the STS forces awry despite the latter’s seemingly superior (to us humans) logistics, technology, infrastructure, and calculations. STS function more deterministically, STO more synchronistically.

In practice, we typically find that an incredibly positive outcome came about only because some instrument of the STS forces (a matrix agent) became the catalyst that deviated the target onto a positive timeline instead of the intended negative one. At first it would seem the STS forces intentionally brought about the positive outcome, but in actuality they intended the opposite, but they simlpy lost the bet and it backfired.

In attempting to make someone weaker, they take on the risk of potentially making him or her stronger. This is true both individually with regard to our dealing with matrix agents or occult attacks, and collectively with humanity facing the various alien, black ops, and end time agendas. In the case of someone spinning off onto a positive future due to a matrix agent acting as the catalyst for that, if we look more closely we see that there was an equal or greater chance that things could have turned out horribly instead, but due to the person playing it safe, wise, and smart it went the opposite way.

It may be said that STS and STO together provide us with the tools, circumstances, and opportunities that increase the rate at which we polarize onto the STS or STO pathways, depending on how we choose to use them.

The Internet, for example, has obviously been a tool for education and spiritual liberation thanks to the proliferation of awareness-raising websites, ebooks, podcasts, and videos and free access to them. It has allowed people otherwise isolated and alone to connect with each other from around the world. And yet it just as well has dumbed down an entire generation with distractions, group think, memes, and soundbytes.

More importantly, the Internet has given the surface and shadow governments an easy way to monitor and profile everyone, in order to build digital models of individuals and networks of individuals to determine whom to control to what extent, or whom to outright round up and eliminate when the opportunity presents itself.

One opportunity would be during a future solar EMP event when society is days away from total chaos and a complete communications blackout allows for surreptitious military operations such as this. They would need to neutralize subversives during time of great chaos, otherwise the latter’s ability to affect the course of history grows exponentially due to the butterfly effect amplifying their actions.

Right now with the status quo still in check, there is a lot of cultural and economic momentum acting as a buffer that makes the system resistant to change. Activists are limited in their reach at the moment since most people are too satiated and complacent to care. But during times of chaos they are suggestible and easily influenced, hence the need to wipe out opinion leaders whose influence runs contrary to the agenda of these STS factions.

But the outcome is still up in the air; such attempts may backfire and be the catalyst needed to deviate humanity onto a positive future, provided things are handled wisely.

How do the physical, etheric, and astral planes as defined in occultism relate to the densities?

The physical plane is the aforementioned space-time continuum, to which the first three densities of life on Earth are bound while incarnate. Animals, plants, and people are very much anchored into the same environment. While all densities have access to the physical plane, just the first three tend to be mired here. Higher density beings prefer staying in their less restrictive higher dimensional environments.

The etheric plane is the “computer code” beneath physical matter, energy, space, and time. Changes to the etheric create corresponding changes in the physical. As humans we only perceive the physical plane, yet it is upheld, permeated, and underpinned by the etheric plane. Physicality is like the tip of the iceberg, and there’s plenty underneath the surface of the etheric ocean.

The etheric plane encodes not only physical objects but additional energies and structures that are nonphysical and invisible to our eyes. So what to human perception looks like a simple plant, in the etheric plane it also has a subtle energy body where the plant’s life force resides, which is visible to clairvoyants as its aura. There are also etheric structures that have no corresponding physical aspects, such as ghosts or thought-forms, or etheric organs in and around the human body that aren’t just mirror duplicates of the physical ones. So there is a lot of “metadata” in the etheric plane not visible in the physical.

The astral plane is more of an inner dimension of consciousness rather than something that underlies space-time like the etheric plane does. The astral environment is completely nonlocal, nonphysical, dream-like, energy-based, and to some degree symbolic. It exists beyond space-time; some would call it time-space instead, a kind of mathematical inversion consisting of three dimensions of imaginary space and one of real time, which is opposite that of physicality as we know it. That is, linear time there can be traversed as easily as we can walk through a network of tunnels. Alternatively, think of it as looking at the index or table of contents of a book and being able to flip to different chapters. Where in the plot is the table of contents? Nowhere, it’s outside of it, yet references it.

What one perceives in the astral is to some degree symbolic interpretations of what’s actually there. This is due to the mind interpreting energy patterns and entities there via its own lexicon of familiar imagery, similar to how dreams are symbolic representations of otherwise ineffable archetypes. So what may seem to the human mind as a library of knowledge there (here I’m referring to the fabled Akashic Records) might be perceived by an alien as a databank full of holographic information bubbles. When near death or past life experiencers report visiting a wonderful realm of landscaped parks and relaxing benches in the afterlife, there is likely no actual grass and wooden benches in the astral plane, it’s just what their mind interprets of the abstract energies and constructs there, or what it creates via its own projections.

Given the above, we can summarily state that 1D, 2D, and 3D are locked into the physical plane when awake and incarnate, that 4D beings additionally have access to the etheric plane, and that 5D beings exist natively in the astral plane.

Note also that as long as a being has an astral body, under certain conditions it can shift its focal point of awareness into the astral environment. Therefore those of 2D, 3D, and 4D can access the astral plane (5D) during sleep, astral projection, and the afterlife. That is because the astral body is rooted in the astral plane even while we are awake and alive; it interfaces with the etheric and physical bodies via the chakra and meridian system, whose components function as translators, transducers, and transceivers between the physical and metaphysical. Thus the 5th Density environment (the astral) can be visited by entities that are not necessarily 5th Density themselves.

What do occult researchers mean by the astral having lower, middle, and higher regions?

Empirically speaking, the lower astral regions are dark and oppressive, some would say “low vibration,” where one finds lost souls and demons. The most powerful demons inhabit the lowest levels, being quarantined there by their own inertia and inability to withstand the energies of the higher astral realms, as if they were the black holes of the spiritual world. From that dark place, they can only project themselves with varying degrees of success into the etheric plane and exert varying degrees of influence upon the physical environment and humans, plants, and animals.

The middle astral region is where average animal group souls, deceased humans, and other 2D/3D density beings (or their astral components) reside or visit. The higher regions are where positive 4D, 5D, and 6D beings reside or visit.

Does it therefore mean the lower, middle, and higher regions of the astral correspond to the lower, middle, and higher densities? Not necessarily: negative 4D and 5D beings are higher than us in terms of conscious sophistication and power (and thus density level) and yet when astral they populate the lower astral regions.

Thus the sliding scale between highest and lowest astral regions entails not density level (at least not directly in a one-to-one correspondence) but rather “vibration” or spiritual purity, integrity, light, vitality, and power. It has more to do with the STO-STS spectrum, than the 1D-7D spectrum.

The higher astral regions have a divine quality and are home to transcendent masters and angelic beings. The lowest regions have an infernal quality and are the home of demons. The difference between angels and demons is the polarity and degree of their spiritual qualities (their STO-ness or STS-ness). Both have extremely large and pure amplitudes of vibration, just that they differ in frequency, one being extremely high and the other extraordinarily low. Angels and demons are on the same sliding scale, just at opposite ends. This scale measures whether a being’s astral body is imbued more with affinity for divine, negentropic, creative, loving, noble impulses… or demonic, entropic, deterministic, hateful, and self-serving impulses. In other words, spiritual life or spiritual death.

Humans are in the middle zone, having comparatively weak and impure amplitudes and having frequencies hovering near the middle of the spectrum. Of course there are saints and psychopaths among us, but they aren’t as polarized as higher density beings of STO or STS orientation because 3D human limitations (our biology, lifespan, physical strength, stamina, and intelligence) place a cap on how much we can accomplish in one life and thus how deeply we can polarize. Higher density beings have more latitude, longer lifespans, and greater intelligence and therefore can polarize more intensely. Animals, meanwhile, in not having as much sentience and thus not as much freewill, are not as polarized as we are, and therefore haven an even dimmer soul vibrational amplitude.

As a being evolves through the densities, its ability to resonate with the divine or demonic increases. In other words, it expresses STO or STS more intensely and at greater extremes of frequency. Hence in the astral, a good-natured human might be a little higher up than a benign animal group soul, and a positive alien higher than the human, and angels higher than the alien. But once you factor negative beings into the equation, you see that higher density does not always mean higher in the astral because a negative alien or demon will be lower in the astral than a negative human.

Again, whereas density measures a being’s degree of conscious sophistication, evolution, and power, there is an additional spiritual or astral factor that measures the presence of light, purity, spirituality, and vitality. This factor can be positive or negative in value, and by clairvoyants is perceived as brightness or darkness of energy. Hence, among 4th Density beings you have both positive and negative types, and this refers to their spiritual polarity or astral qualities, i.e the intensity and purity of their STO or STS tendencies. For example, the lowest beings in the astral, the chthonic demonic overlords, are incredibly dense and pure centers of STS impulses, like black holes. Meanwhile angels are likewise intense and pure centers of STO impulses, like radiant suns.

In occultism, the astral body is the seat of cognized impression, passions, willpower, emotions, and wishes. These are all energies or impulses that, like vectors, point in a certain direction. For us humans they can either point more upward and toward our higher nobler self or downwards toward the baser self. When the astral body is polluted with impulses that point in the direction of serving matter, it undergoes a bit of spiritual entropy or decay or darkening because it loses the nondeterministic creative qualities intrinsic to spirit and instead subjects itself to the deterministic entropic tendencies of matter.

Demons are an extreme example of the latter, who despite being nonphysical are nevertheless embodiments of death, entropy, decay, destruction (characteristics of matter, as proven by the laws of thermodynamics) and sow these wherever they go. They are extensions of the “Abyss,” reaching upward like tentacles and pulling everything it can grasp down to its level. Demons pollute our etheric environment with their low vibrational energies, make plants, animals, and people ill as a result, and seek to destroy all qualities of spirit within a person.

So the higher and lower astral environments are inhabited by beings of higher and lower spiritual polarities. Thus a kind of resonance is established between who you are and where you go in the astral. This explains some of the discrepancies between what people experience when they die. Some report entering a healing environment surrounded by loving helpers, others report being taken into dark hell worlds of torment. The latter admit to being angry, selfish, negative people, so what they experienced correlated with who they were internally at time of death. To visit the higher astral regions, you have to be of a corresponding higher spiritual nature or be taken there by divine grace.

Of course, positive beings from these higher regions can elect to come down into the lower ones without too much difficulty when divine intervention is required. In contrast, the lower beings cannot enter the higher because they lack the energy, strength, and integrity to rise up without losing cohesion in their chosen astral polarity; thus such beings tend to disintegrate (they describe it as burning, as in “the light is burning me”) if they enter too vibrationally high an environment, which is the last thing they usually want.

Note that even our everyday 3D environment, with its everyday events and everyday people, is vibrationally higher than the level where these demons originate. So when they project themselves out of their astral pits into our environment (mainly our etheric environment) they undergo disintegration unless they can gather enough dark energies to condition a space (such as a bedroom, bar, basement, corner of the closet, a haunted box, tomb, etc.) to make things more comfortable for themselves, commonly referred to as nesting.

Where do angels and the Higher Self fit into all this?

We know that angels are natively nonphysical; that’s why you never see them with functional suits, devices, ships, bases, or eating food. In being nonphysical, they don’t have physical limitations that require technology to overcome. For the same reason, demons in their natural form also don’t display technology, let alone clothing. The etheric plane (which is tied to the physical) however has laws that are quasi-physical in nature, thus there exists etheric technology, devices, ships, and bases. However in the astral it’s all 100% consciousness.

Therefore we can say that angels, who are energy beings (not necessarily robed humanoids with wings) are at least 5D. But angels are a bit impersonal, rigid in their ethics, group-oriented, and extremely powerful. This would place them above your typical 5D denizen who has comparatively more individuality and thus more autonomy. Therefore angels are likely 6D beings.

If we go by theological and occult explanation of angels, they are not necessarily lifeforms who have evolved upwards from 1st to 2nd to 3rd density all the way to 6th. Rather they are directly-projected emanations from the Creator, from the top down. As Rudolf Steiner explained, they are direct personifications of cosmic metaphysical laws.

As for the Higher Self, according to the Ra and Cassiopaean Material, 5D is the last density where individualized personal progress is possible. The end of 5D comes with perfection of the individual path. In 6D, further progress is only possible as a group, since highly integrated networked consciousness represents a new dynamic over the individual.

So since the Higher Self is a kind of impersonal perfected self, but not yet one that is integrated with other Higher Selves as part of a soul group (which is not the same as a group soul, which is the oversoul of a species of animals or plants), that would place the Higher Self at the transition zone between 5D and 6D.

Why do the Ra and Cassiopaean sources differ on the upper densities?

The Cassiopaeans say 7th Density is the end and represents ultimate union with “One/All”, while Ra says 7th Density is still somewhat like 6th density where they reside and that 8th Density is where it all ends/restarts. So the only difference is semantics, in that what the Ra source terms 6th and 7th density are for the Cassiopaeans merely the earlier and latter parts of 6th Density.

How does this density paradigm explain the Demiurge?

Ra mentions negative forces can’t evolve past 5D. That appears to be true since individual evolution ends with the end of 5D, and STS evolution focuses on enhancement of the individual self at the expense of everyone else. Therefore it would be impossible for a negative individual to give up his individuality and remain negative.

However, the Cassiopaeans say there still exists a “thought-form reflection” of the STS archetype in 6D, whom the reptilians worship and is called by some Ormethion (from Greek hormon meaning “that which sets in motion”, horman “impel, urge on”, and horme “onset, impulse”). In short, it is identically the Corrupt Demiurge that I discussed in my Gnosis series.

The Corrupt Demiurge is a portion of the “world soul” (whose substance consists of the astral and etheric planes) that has acquired negative programming (a universal ego) and therefore works in the service of matter rather than spirit. It is not a sentient negative being like a 5th Density demon that has graduated to 6th Density, but something more omnipresent and impersonal, a kind of harmonic overtone in 6th density of the STS collectives in the lower densities and lower levels of the astral plane.

The Corrupt Demiurge bears the outer characteristics of a 6D construct, but while being of a negative spiritual polarity (low frequency vibration). But it’s more of an artificial intelligence without true sentience; it proceeds with pseudo-autonomy while lacking the spirit core that might have given it true sentience. Hence it’s more of a demon-like machine, and hence it is the central mainframe of the Matrix Control System. It is therefore a negative thought-form reflection in 6D, especially in light of what I explained in the first Gnosis article about what a thoughtform is, namely an etheric and astral construct with a programmed intelligence.

Thus what Ra and the Cassiopaeans say is not a contradiction since Ra says individual, personal STS evolution beyond 5D isn’t possible, and the 6D thought-form reflection is not a product of an individual’s evolution to that state, but more an imprinting of the 6D Demiurge with the STS impulses of sentient STS beings in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Densities.

Why do the Demiurge, Higher Self, and Angels seem to have quantum-synchronistic control over our physical environment?

The Demiurge is traditionally understood to be the shaper, fashioner, perpetuator of our physical universe. It does this according to whatever directives it’s given. Ideally it takes its directives from the divine and fashions physicality in a divinely harmonious manner. But the corrupted portion of the Demiurge presently does this in the interests of matter and the STS food chain, thereby establishing harsher than otherwise predatory and spiritually oppressive conditions for those under its dominion. Therefore the Demiurge and/or Corrupt Demiurge are, by definition, active at the “root level” of our physical existence, meaning they are actively shaping our five-sense reality via the etheric plane (which, as you may recall, is the “matrix code” behind physicality).

Now, the Higher Self was explained as being at the border between 5D and 6D, while angels were firmly in 6D. The Ra and Cassiopaean sources also claim to be 6D and say they are light beings. It’s interesting to note that one thing these all have in common is that they function as oracles. An oracle works via synchronistic communication. Synchronicity is the opposite of material deterministic causality; synchronicity occurs thanks to something outside space-time influencing the course of events here. When you shuffle tarot cards, throw I Ching coins, receive an omen or encounter an everyday synchronicity, these can only come about because probability is being tweaked at a very fine level — the quantum level — with surgical precision.

Divination employs methods of communication with intelligences who possess such finesse and control; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to influence random events into meaningful patterns. So divination is one means of contacting oracular sources. Hence, oracular intelligences are the same ones that have surgical control over our physical environment (way beyond the capability of 4D beings). This suggests that there’s something about 6D that demonstrates an immense mastery over the etheric and hence physical environment.

To better understand this, observe the following relations between physical, etheric, astral and the densities:

At the very beginning of 1D, elementary particles are found. They are nothing more than physical bodies. Thus 1D is associated with the earliest stirrings of matter.

In the beginning of 2D, the plant kingdom arises, which differs from elementary particles in that plants possess a vibrant etheric body in addition to the physical body. Thus the beginning of 2D is associated with the first stirrings of the etheric.

In the latter half of 2D, the animal kingdom develops, which has acquired an astral body in addition to the etheric and physical. So upper 2D is associated with the first stirrings of the astral.

In 3D, individuality begins to manifest and via the freewill this endows, one chooses the spiritual orientation of whether to work for the good of everyone, or work only for oneself at the expense of others. 3D is therefore associated with the first stirrings of individualization and freewill, which are properties of spirit.

In 4th Density, with the choice of spiritual polarity having been made, it is now lived to its fullest. One’s individuality and freewill are thereby mastered, and so spirit is developed to its fullest.

In 5th Density, one leaves physicality completely behind and moves on into the astral environment and perfects oneself there. Here, the astral nature is mastered.

In 6th Density, beings acquire mastery over the etheric environment, which allows them to alter our reality at will.

In 7th Density, one becomes unified with All, and that includes matter and all other aspects of existence. Hence one achieves true mastery over existence itself.

Notice the symmetry in this. Whereas matter first arises in 1D, matter is subsumed upon attaining 7D. Whereas the etheric first arises in lower 2D, it is mastered in 6D. Whereas the astral first arises in upper 2D, it is mastered in 5D. And whereas individuality and spiritual polarization first arises in 3D it is taken to its logical conclusion in 4D.

For some reason this symmetry has never been discussed in either the Ra or Cassiopaean or derivative material, yet it’s obviously there.

The point of this is to show that since upper 1D / lower 2D and 6D are counterparts, that if the etheric body initially develops in the first, etheric mastery is acquired in the latter. And by controlling the etheric plane, they control our space-time continuum fully. That is how the Demiurge perpetuates our universe. Hence 6D and the types of intelligences found there have bizarre control over our physical environment. 6D STO are completely outside this snow globe we call reality, looking in at us and tweaking things as required, limited only by the laws of the divine framework governing the whole thing.

Why doesn’t the Higher Self just tell us everything we need to know, or take us over, so that we skip right to 6th Density?

One of the fundamentals of this creation is freewill and self-discovery or self-learning, because in acting and experiencing, one grows. That’s the point of being separated from the Creator or Higher Self and being endowed with freewill. It’s the absolute core directive of our existence. Why are there video games instead of just books and movies? Because people want to play and discover for themselves, they want to exercise their freedom and experience a world.

So it’s more than just knowledge-lessons, but also soul-growth and deepest wisdom and self-discovery at work here. Some things we know only because we have gone through them, and these lessons and changes would not have penetrated so deeply into our souls so quickly if one were just watching from the sidelines.

If the Higher Self really is the end point of one’s personal evolution, an omega reaching into the river of time to help out its lower/past tributaries, then it’s very unlikely that within your currently human lifetime you can become 100% identical with it. You can only “channel” it or “anchor” it so to speak, but you won’t fully be it because you haven’t gone through the future paths that it’s already gone through. Intellectual learning isn’t the same as testing yourself and being changed by the experience.

Being that we are autonomous, yet potentially connected with the Higher Self if we choose, there is a golden mean between the two extremes of being 100% your Higher Self, and 100% your baser self. It’s the place where you are most conscious, devoted, effective as a human being: noble and ethical, in intuitive or conscious communion with the Higher Self, given to creativity, self-expression, discretion, chivalry, love, empathy, and so on.

Contrary to popular opinion, the baser self isn’t what makes us human; it’s what makes us animalistic or demonic. The middle self is what makes us human, in that we have the capacity to choose what we align with, listen to, and think and feel from. By choosing spirit, we express it, thereby exercising it, and consequently growing increasingly congruent with it. That pathway of congruency is an ongoing process lasting into 4D and 5D as the choice of STO is lived out to its fullest.

Where is the so-called Kingdom of Heaven among the densities?

Clearly it would have to be an STO realm. But what density? Notice there is a distinction between the mythical Garden of Eden and the Kingdom of Heaven. They are similar in that both are domains of the divine. But in the first, humans are naive and innocent beings, pure yet vulnerable. That represents the 3D STO state, which is a form of infantile bliss.

The Kingdom of Heaven is said to be accessible through the mediation of Christ, who is equated with Life and thus with the Tree of Life. Entering the Kingdom of Heaven is not a return to the old but a stepping into a new transcendent state, a graduation of sorts. In the Book of Genesis, the Elohim lament that if Adam and Eve ate also from the Tree of Life (which Christ later represented) and not just the Tree of Knowledge (which ejected them into the 3D STS realm in order to learn the nature of good and evil) then they would become like the Elohim and acquire everlasting life. This shows that the Elohim themselves are transcendent, and the Christ connection implies they are denizens of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Thus at minimum, the Kingdom of Heaven is the 4th Density STO realm. If we interpret the Kingdom to be entirely nonphysical, then that would place it in 5th Density, meaning the upper strata of the astral. It would be useful, therefore, to generalize the Kingdom of Heaven to mean the 4th, 5th, and 6th Density STO realms. It may be defined as “a transcendent STO state and environment.”

The Kingdom of Heaven would be a composite of these densities. It would thereby consist of 4th Density STO “knights” at the bottom, 5th Density nonphysical “kings” or “wizards” or “masters” in the middle, and 6th density “oracles” or “godheads” or “unseen ones” or “angels” near the top. This structure is represented in the Grail myths and imitated by various chivalric orders throughout earthly history, for example the Cathars.

]]>
http://montalk.net/metaphys/267/sto-sts-and-densities
Sat, 14 Mar 2015 05:44:40 GMTmontalktag:montalk.net,2015-03-13:02af41a423fdd0818f041a3984ee47d1/24a7eb06f7580364dcf8bdfaf92a2354Stages of Conscious Awakening
How to awaken from sleep and return to full spiritual remembrance. ]]>
It is imperative that we awaken from mundane awareness into full spiritual remembrance of who we are. The problem is that even when physically awake, we can still be mentally asleep, unaware of ourselves and entirely absorbed in whatever mechanical impulse or external stimulus captures our attention. This state of confluence, or mental absorption, keeps us in an unproductive dream state.

The common understanding of what it means to be “awake” disguises the truth, which is that despite walking around with eyes open, people tend to nonetheless be hypnotized, dimly conscious, sleepwalking, daydreaming, or in a state of trance. What all these states have in common is that the conscious core of the individual is absent or passive, blowing like a leaf in the winds of environmental stimuli.

In dreams we might make the strangest “logical” associations that amount to no logic at all, have little say in what happens to us, do things impulsively, and fail to question our reality or observe ourselves. Compare this to how people tend to behave in everyday life, the anecdotes and gossip they speak, how they might communicate via recitations of lines from movies or TV shows, speak in trite memetic phrases without conscious thought or originality, engage in ludicrous programmed behavior, engross themselves in petty dramas, and switch between goofy or borrowed personalities. For them, dreams do not end in the morning.

The world is an insane asylum but society is too asleep to notice the insanity. Just as you may not question insane dreams while having them, some people never question their insane lives. The implications of mass somnambulism is obvious: with billions of people asleep, those in power who are awake have the advantage. Sleeping people are easily controlled. Their conscious core exists within a mental prison, harvested for time, labor, and energy. They possess little or no freewill because they have abandoned the awareness necessary to harness it.

The mind and body can be asleep or awake independently of each other. With mind and body awake, one is truly awake. With mind and body asleep, one is dreaming. With mind awake and body asleep, one is lucid-dreaming. With mind asleep and body awake, one is sleepwalking. Gradations exist between these four states, ranging from hypnotism and trance to daydreaming and dim consciousness.

Stage 1: Breaking Negative Confluence

The first step to awakening requires breaking out of this negative confluence by gaining a degree of lucidity, a measure of self-awareness. At any moment you can turn your attention inward and observe yourself, placing your attention firmly in the present moment. You can notice your thoughts, analyze your feelings, pay attention to the sensations in your body, feel your breath, engage in self-examination, and survey your situation and surroundings from a higher perspective.

In doing so, you quickly become aware that all these perceptions ultimately originate from outside of you even if they are playing out inside your own mind. That is because at the very core of your mind is a center of perception that defines the true you, while the peripheral territory of your mind is populated by thoughts that may or may not be your own. This inner core is the silent observer, the consciousness watching through your eyes and thinking through your mind. It is that which experiences, chooses, realizes, and lives. The rest is just machinery.

Becoming lucid depends on being cognizant of your own awareness. Some call this self-remembering since confluence is the state of self-forgetting. Lucidity is as simple as turning within and remembering yourself in the present moment. Remembering yourself stops confluence, and stopping confluence is the first step to snapping out of what suffocates your spiritual identity. It is one thing to know that you are, but quite another to know who you are. In time, the first leads to the second.

Being consciously present in the moment is easy to implement but difficult to maintain. Books have been written on just this task alone. The problem is both physical and metaphysical. Initially, heightening one’s state of awareness requires both vital energy and an adequate supply of neurotransmitters. These deplete after a short period of exertion and one slips back into lowered consciousness. But like a muscle, mental focus grows with training because the physical and subtle bodies adapt to a greater demand for energy.

Maintaining lucidity becomes easier with practice, as with practice one gradually increases the length and depth of focus. By practicing lucidity in a controlled setting, the same state of heightened awareness can more easily be reached and maintained under more natural circumstances. Hence some forms of meditation assist the training of self-awareness.

One common method of exercising lucidity is mindfulness meditation, where you pay attention to your thoughts and sensations by being a calm and lucid third party observer. Unlike transcendental meditation where chanting a mantra for hours leads to self-hypnosis and a lowering of consciousness, mindfulness meditation raises consciousness.

Another practice called Vipassana requires that you relax and then pay attention to every sensation in your body, starting with the top of your head and working your way down to your toes, then back to the top. The primary benefit of this type of meditation is that we become conscious of signals that are otherwise ignored and forgotten. This is useful because in this modern age not only do we normally forget ourselves, but we tend to forget our own bodies. For instance, watching television or using the internet places our attention into virtual bodies that displace our own. This causes a schism between mind and body in addition to the already prevalent disconnection between self and mind. Dissociation of this type is antagonistic to higher awareness. Observing physical sensations goes toward mending the schism, which in turn assists conscious integration between self and mind.

Additionally, Vipassana and related exercises such as Robert Bruce’s New Energy Ways or the Microcosmic Orbit Meditation of Taoist yoga all have the effect of stimulating nonphysical structures and circuits within the etheric body, which if nothing else can help remove blockages and stagnant energies. If properly executed with sufficient regularity of practice, however, these can also awaken certain extrasensory abilities.

Dealing with Negative Emotions

Becoming mindful of your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations is also useful in transmuting internal negative emotional energy. By observing negative emotions as they arise and objectively noticing the physiological sensations they evoke, one keeps from entering into a runaway feedback loop between thoughts and emotions that would otherwise explode into over-reactivity and generate a skewed sense of perception and judgment. In other words, this practice can break your confluence with external provocations.

If the negative emotion is triggered by some button-pushing event, lucid awareness of the emotion itself (rather than where it points, or the person/event that triggered it) is a way of defusing the negative energy without suppressing it. On the other hand, if negativity is more a constant pressure without any specific trigger, then self-awareness helps you stand upright against the pull of this emotional gravity.

In the midst of such storms, through lucidity you will find that you are the eye of that hurricane, an impersonal observer who stands above and beyond. That is the pivot point that disarms and transmutes the energy.

So, lucidity is the key to keeping one’s composure. Only when you have gotten the upper hand over an escalating emotion are you in a position to make an informed choice as to whether to go with it or reign it in; without awareness, that choice is never made and one simply reacts like an animal.

Suppressing emotions by allowing them to fester as you turn to look the other way will cause them to flare up in unexpected ways at unexpected times. This is not healthy; emotions must be dealt with, not ignored. By becoming aware of the raw emotional energy, you can instead harness it — when appropriate. This includes anger in cases where the imminent action fueled by that anger is both wise and necessary, meaning if one is too weak to take care of needed business otherwise.

If a negative emotion and its associated action is not appropriate, then awareness of that energy and remembrance of yourself as the transcendent observer will defuse the energy and transmute it into a higher grade of spiritual fuel for your soul.

Thus whether you harness the energy toward needed action or toward transmutation into a higher form of positive energy, either way you are dealing with it instead of suppressing it.

Stage 2: Positive Confluence

In summary, observing yourself expands the bandwidth of your awareness, breaks negative forms of confluence, and has enhancing effects on your brain and soul. Returning to your center allows you to choose in the moment what to think, feel, or do next. Without self-awareness there is no choice, just a mechanical reaction to a given stimulus. By default we behave like machines, but at any moment we can regain lucidity and disengage the autopilot.

It would therefore seem that self-remembering, mindfulness, or lucidity is all we need to develop spiritually, but unfortunately that is not sufficient. Some esoteric schools of thought stop there and become preoccupied with deprogramming and self-remembering in an effort to pick the weeds of the mind and soul. However, without planting the seeds, adding water and sunshine, what remains is an immaculate but ultimately barren field of dirt.

Notice that by itself, lucidity is merely a state of mindfulness that squelches mechanical reactivity and lets you think on what to do next, but it doesn’t necessarily offer a transcendental or transjective influence to direct you toward the ideal outcome. The sword is liberated from the stone but no map or compass is provided for the quest.

And thus there is need for a second stage in conscious development that goes beyond mere self-remembering. While the first stage aims to interrupt negative confluence, the second stage involves initiating positive confluence with the higher aspects of your being. Speaking from your heart, following your intuition, tapping into your subconscious, virtually “channeling” your Higher Self — these are all examples of positive confluence.

Here, you willingly seek out these higher impulses and let them flow as your self-awareness takes a back seat. Reflect upon times when words flowed from you that must have come from something higher. What you said was wiser and more helpful than anything you could have come up with solely on your own. And while they were flowing, you were unaware of yourself as though in a trance (not unconscious, just not self-aware). This is a state of being in the flow, in the so-called “zone”.

This type of confluence is productive and happens from time to time even without being trained in self-observation. However, self-observation helps you make these connections more consistently and intentionally by reducing interruptions by periods of negative confluence, mainly through your noticing them and nipping them in the bud.

The main function of the second stage is to strengthen your connection with the higher centers, the higher chakras, the uplinks to your Higher Self or Higher Mind. By grooving a conduit to these higher aspects through regular use, their influences become more permanent. This is important because at this second stage, becoming lucid while being in the flow will momentarily interrupt the flow. For instance, speaking from your heart but then suddenly becoming aware of yourself temporarily breaks the connection.

Lucidity hampers all types of confluence, even the positive ones. That is, unless the flow is sufficiently strong such that lucidity does not interrupt it. To illustrate, consider how when we first drift off to sleep at night, if we catch ourselves falling asleep we immediately wake up again. In this case, the initial sleep state is not strong enough to withstand the conscious mind suddenly withdrawing from confluence. However, once one has entered deeper sleep and begun dreaming, it is possible to become lucid and continue dreaming. Those who are unskilled in lucid dreaming have difficulty either maintaining their lucidity, whereupon they continue dreaming unaware, or maintaining their dream state, whereupon they break out of sleep upon realizing they are dreaming. But with practice the state of lucid dreaming can be prolonged.

Stage 3: Positive Lucidity

What does this say about positive confluence? It says that positive confluence is merely a means toward making the connection with one’s higher aspects sufficiently permanent (through repeated exposure and practice, which in turn changes the structure of the brain and soul to create a more hardwired connection) so that one can eventually have self-awareness and not break the connection.

This is the third stage: being simultaneously connected and lucid.

There are two categories of meditation, one lowers consciousness and the other raises it. Both seek to unify the conscious mind with the subconscious and thereby achieve integration of the whole being. But while the first category is regressive, the second is progressive.

Regressive meditation seeks to dissolve the ego into the subconscious so that, in theory, one becomes an unconscious extension of higher sources. If one thereby enters into positive confluence, then that is good.

But with the subconscious merely being a doorway to anything and everything outside the lower self, without deliberately setting a genuine positive destination that doorway could just as easily lead toward becoming a puppet of subconscious complexes, power tripping gurus, or negative entities.

This means that regressive practices carry the risk of losing ego in favor of potentially malevolent influences. Mindless chanting of a mantra, focusing on an external guru, practicing channeling with no filters in place, and slipping into altered states of consciousness for the sake of novelty are examples of things that carry this risk. If you are not engaged in positive confluence with your spiritual core by being and feeling it, then there’s no telling what you’re entering into confluence with.

Some forms of meditation marketed to the West should be called mindlessness meditations because that is precisely what they accomplish: a lowering of awareness into a murky state of unconsciousness that only ends up creating habitual mindless trance states and susceptility to manipulation by delusional or malevolent forces; it works for stress relief the same way psychiatric drugs take the edge off, but it is inappropriate for spiritual development since at best it merely inebriates and tranquilizes and at worst leads to becoming a mindless puppet.

Technically speaking, positive confluence is regressive because it puts us back into the naive childlike state of divine innocence as before the Fall. Self-awareness is lowered into mere awareness as one becomes an expression of a higher will. But as long as this remains a means rather than ends, that is okay. This state has its uses and is better than being in negative confluence, which is the sleepwalking state society seems to be in or the mindless puppet state that certain meditators and channelers enter into.

Despite being regressive, positive confluence is also better than being in a sterile state of lucidity not connected to anything positive, as happens with those who practice self-remembering for years without ever training their capacity for love, empathy, intuition, and other faculties of spirit. They become very lucid but also very cold and hardened, signifying the onset of ossification or Ahrimanization of the soul.

So as a means, positive confluence (Stage 2) is more useful as a stepping stone toward emerging into active divine consciousness (Stage 3). The goal is operating with self-awareness intact so that rather than being an unconscious extension of a higher source, one evolves into that higher source.

In this third stage, one practices self-awareness without interrupting the flow of impressions flowing from the higher centers. This amounts to a passive observation and gentle allowance of the influence your Higher Self exerts over your thoughts, feelings, words, and actions.

Why is lucidity important again after it was set aside in the second stage? Because staying lucid while letting positive influences work from within is simply an act of supervising the process so that you can step in as necessary to correct deviations or initiate a new line of inquiry and action.

The problem with Stage 2 is that positive confluence easily passes into negative because one is not always self-aware enough to catch the switchover. Think of a dreamer who is heartful and wise in one dream, then quickly sinks into stress and anger when the dream changes to something negative. There is no consistency. That is why I said positive confluence is fragile, just as Adam and Eve were in a fragile state that was good while it lasted, but ignorance is bliss and that ignorance allowed them to be easily swayed by interceding negative forces.

It is difficult enough to gain lucidity without interrupting the flow, which is why lucidity must at first be passive in the beginning of the third stage, meaning “watch yourself but do not interfere with the expression of your heart.” This, as distinguished from the “express your heart and higher wisdom by forgetting yourself” aspect of the second stage. The latter is a means toward achieving the first, however, so anyone stuck in Stage 1 to the point of having become more lucid but simultaneously colder inside, should practice entering into positive confluence. That means loosening up and absorbing yourself into positive, productive, creative, empathic, revelatory, and generally spiritual activities.

Once the lower self is free of negative confluence and the Higher Self has a clear and permanent communication link (achieved through brain and soul structure enhancements brought about through the aforementioned exercises) and both higher and lower are present at the same time, a mutual flow of communication is possible. The lower self becomes an adept assimilating the wisdom and essence of the Higher Self, thereby rising to its level. In this way, the lower finally merges with the higher and achieves total integration of being.

This is different from the higher sinking into the lower during positive confluence; it is different from annihiliation of ego and the return to a primitive pure state. Rather, it is a forward progression, an entelechy of human consciousness.

Nonlinear Evolution

In practice, these stages of conscious awakening are not discretely sequential like grades in school. Rather, we occupy one of the stages as a primary center of gravity yet can spontaneously spike into the higher levels or drop into the lower.

The higher stages are trickier to access and maintain, but that does not mean we are barred from accessing them, just that without practice we access them less frequently. The glimpses we catch of the higher stages should motivate us to acquire them permanently as our new center of gravity. This is much like regular dreamers being motivated by spontaneous lucid dreams to practice and have them more frequently until it becomes the normal mode of dreaming. Higher awareness happens in flashes, like a fluorescent bulb flickering before fully igniting.

Shortcomings of Existing Systems

As for esoteric systems like Fourth Way claiming that the higher remains incomprehensible until the lower stages are mastered, remember that there is a difference between systems of conscious evolution and systems of conscious awakening. We are not here to grow our souls from scratch, as there is no time left for that, but rather to awaken ourselves into full spiritual remembrance. We don’t start off life as a blank slate, for the incarnating spirit is already quite seasoned from prior incarnations. The higher centers of the soul may simply be latent or atrophied due to biological and social programming factors we receive from birth that cause neglect and forgetting; if so, then accessing them is not as impossible and incomprehensible as Fourth Way makes it out to be. I think Fourth Way was speaking more for the general mass of dimly conscious people in this world (including spiritless humans) instead of those who are in the upper percentile, but in force fitting the latter into the first it does great harm.

So we have society in general advocating a kind of Stage 0 consisting of negative confluence (to the exclusion of anything higher), Fourth Way and similar paradigms advocating Stage 1 (to the exclusion of anything higher), and Christianity and Buddhism each emphasizing dissolution of the lower self per Stage 2 (to the exclusion of anything higher). While these are each progressively better than the previous, they all stop short of the aforementioned entelechy of human consciousness, which is the fulfillment of our potential without restrictions and exceptions.

Few systems concern themselves with Stage 3. For that, one would have to look toward the Hermetic, Gnostic, Rosicrucian, Toltec, Fifth Way, and Anthroposophical streams.

Conclusion

Interestingly, the stages of conscious awakening reflect the macrocosmic process of conscious evolution. What follows is a diagram comparing the two:

The process can be painted via the following story. A prince leaves his father’s kingdom and suffers a loss of memory then leads the life of a peasant until he grows weary of poverty. In his yearning for a better life, he suddenly remembers he is a prince and returns to see his father. From afar he watches his father carry out the duties of a king, then when certain of his own identity, the prince gathers enough courage to speak with his father. In the years following this reunion, the king teaches his son all his wisdom until one day the prince himself becomes king.

The goal is to retrieve what was locked away within us, to re-establish contact with our higher centers, and ultimately remember who we are. And it all begins with self-observation and listening to your heart.

Further Reading

Hypsoconsciousness – John Baines. A guidebook on “various exercises to aid the individual in elevating his level of consciousness through concentration, relaxation, centeredness, will power and the development of a superior I.”

The Stellar Man – John Baines. Synthesis of modern psychology and Hermeticism. Thorough explanation of the Hermetic Principles. Also includes a legend of how Moses screwed things up by making a pact with a demonic entity named “Y”.

Gnosis Book I, Book II, and Book III – Boris Mouravieff. Supposedly based on the original teachings of which Fourth Way is just a collection of fragments, Mouravieff considered his approach the Fifth Way. Main source is inner Eastern Orthodox, but probably traces back to Sufi and related groups. Something valuable on every page. Not a fan of his political views, but the esoteric stuff is spot on. Includes discussion on spiritless humans, called pre-Adamics.

Changelog

]]>
http://montalk.net/metaphys/117/stages-of-conscious-awakening
Thu, 08 Jan 2015 01:10:07 GMTmontalktag:montalk.net,2005-08-17:02af41a423fdd0818f041a3984ee47d1/85116b65a9c92ea612a91d526b29c837Soul Resonance and Music
The cause of musical preference, how melody and harmony resonate the soul, and an occult history of music.]]>

In this Article

Why do people like certain types of music and not other types?

Is musical preference merely a product of social conditioning?

To what extent do biological and metaphysical factors play a role?

What exactly is texture, rhythm, melody, and harmony?

Which of these elements invoke resonance in the soul?

How do melody and harmony differ in their metaphysical nature and effects upon the soul?

What are the pros and cons of polyphonic versus monophonic music?

What are the psychological and spiritual implications of key modulation?

Introduction

There are subjective and objective reasons why you might prefer one song over another. Subjective reasons include:

Tradition: because that is what you heard while growing up. Your preference then arises from habit and identification with your family and culture. You derive pleasure from safety, comfort, and familiarity. Folk and country music feature this prominently.

Identity: because the song is a token representation of some subculture you have invested your social identity into, whereby the music is more a fashion accessory or emblem displayed before others. You derive satisfaction from the reactions you get from others. Anything associated with a distinctive look such as rap, punk, goth, country, and metal can serve this function.

Sentiment: because you hear a song during a meaningful or emotional time in your life, and the two become linked together in your mind. The song will then trigger those same emotions when heard again in the future. Like a scent of perfume bringing back fond memories, you derive pleasure from the sentimental effect this brings. Pop songs, especially ballads frequently played on the radio, appeal to this factor.

Alone, these factors have little to do with the intrinsic musicality of the song. They merely project subjective values upon what is heard.

True music is measured by the degree to which its melody, harmony, rhythm, and texture in and of themselves evoke an objective response in us. For example, a minor chord sounds sad without us ever needing to be conditioned to feel that. Infants can distinguish between harmonious and dissonant chords well before their enculturation. A beat can make us clap or tap our foot without having to be taught to do so, as seen in babies who bend their knees and bounce to the music instinctively. Similarly, an odd pattern of strange sounds can make us tilt our heads in curiosity.

Some objective responses stimulate the intellect, some the physical body, and some the emotional and spiritual aspects of our being. So in addition to the aforementioned subjective reasons for musical preference, there are also objective ones:

Intrigue: your intellect is aroused by the originality, quirkiness, or complexity of a song. You find amusement in being stirred from boredom, apathy, or jadedness by its novelty. Experimental electronica, noise, and math rock focus exclusively on this aspect.

Groove: the song’s beat and rhythm stimulate the motor and speech areas of your brain, provoking you to dance. You derive pleasure from the endorphins released through physical movement, from the social approval and camaraderie present when dancing with others, and it simply feels good being physically motivated and energized by the sonic equivalent of a stimulant drug.

Resonance: there is something within a song that stimulates something within you at the emotional, spiritual, archetypal level. It evokes a response according to how much we inwardly resonate with that song’s combination of melody, harmony, rhythm, and texture.

Songs typically represent a mixture of all the above. When a song combines several factors, it has greater impact and wider appeal:

A bit of emotional resonance goes a long way toward building associative conditioning, which then amplifies the apparent emotional intensity of the song and leads to a strong sentimental effect. This is the basis of sappy ballads played on radio stations throughout the 70s and 80s.

Groove enhances intellectually fascinating songs by adding some physical energy, making it both interesting and fun, with many examples to be found in electronic music.

Groove combined with tradition makes for a high dance factor, as can be heard in Eastern European folk dances, samba and salsa, Mexican polka, American hoedowns and country line dancing.

Identity, groove, intrigue, and resonation of anger may be found in most forms of nu metal, djent, screamo, grindcore, etc.

Musical Preferences

We know that people differ in the degree to which they respond to a song. Some may not identify with the tradition being represented; some find its intellectual complexity confusing and irritating; some only desire groove and find little appeal in a slow emotional ballad; some do not have within their souls the aspects that a song is aiming to resonate; some never had a meaningful or emotional experience linked with a particular song that, for someone else, has much sentimental value.

So when different people respond differently to the same song, understand that in regard to the objective factors, the difference involves only the degree to which that factor is present in that person. A quirky and complex experimental piece might arouse much interest in one person, little interest in another, and strong disinterest in a third. When a song has groove, one person will dance uncontrollably, another will only tap his or her foot, and another with no sense of rhythm will fold his arms in boredom. When a song resonates the emotion of happiness, one person will have tears in her eyes, another will merely feel uplifted, and another might not care for feeling happy at the moment. It’s about varying degrees on the same scale.

On the other hand, the subjective factors have no such consistency:

One man hears a song during his first kiss, another just prior to the car accident that killed his wife. The same song by association will evoke a smile in the first and sadness in the latter.

The same rap song brings a sense of belonging and identity to one person and a sense of hatred or contempt against black culture in another.

Negative association can be so strong that it overrides the intrinsic resonance value of a song. One person likes metal because it resonates his inner sense of valor and strength, another hates it solely because her abusive ex-boyfriend was in a metal band.

Strong antipathy against certain music is usually due to a combination of lack of resonance, negative conditioned associations, clash against one’s tradition or subcultural affiliation, and dislike of the bodily responses induced by a song’s texture and rhythm (such as strong dance beats coming off as licentious to the prudish, or distorted guitars grating the ears of those who prefer comfort and gentleness).

So the question arises, what does musical preference say about a person? Here are some possibilities:

If you like a song solely because of tradition, identification, or sentimentalism then that simply indicates the nature of the experiences and social influences you have been imprinted with. It says very little about your inner being. How can it, if resonance to a song’s intrinsic musicality played no part in your always listening to it or singing it?

If you like a song solely for its intellectual intrigue, then that merely indicates you haven’t really heard something like it before. It is something new, surprising, and thus amusing. If the song is complex and abstract, maybe it says you have an active intellect that enjoys abstract sensory stimulation. But it says nothing about your soul.

If you like songs solely for their groove, then you’re probably a kinesthetic person with good hand-eye coordination and a healthy motor-speech system in the brain. It speaks more to your physiological and neurological composition than anything.

These factors don’t provide much insight into your inner emotional, spiritual, archetypal composition. For that, we must look at the resonance factor, whereby something in music resonates something in you. In other words, pure communication from song to soul.

Soul Resonance

Our internal compositions differ; we don’t all have the same emotional resonance spectrum. A song can only resonate what is there to be resonated, and if a portion of one’s inner spectrum is absent, then the corresponding qualities of the song will not be noticed, let alone felt. Like two people with different types of color blindness, it’s possible for one person to see something in a song that the other cannot, and vice versa. This kind of difference is not due to a difference in subjective projection or association, but inner perception of what is objectively there.

So what we’re really talking about here is soul resonance characteristics, meaning the unique spectrum of emotions, themes of experience, and pathways to fulfillment that you most deeply respond to and yearn for. These can be glimpsed by asking yourself the following questions:

What are your deepest priorities?

What brings you the greatest fulfillment?

What motivates your existence?

What completes you as a being?

The answers may correspond to the music you resonate with most. Esoterically, the answers to these questions also correspond to the “story of your life.” The same soul resonance characteristics that are touched by music are also touched by your inner responses to life events. In fact, it is these resonance characteristics that synchronistically attract such events in the first place through quantum-metaphysical processes. Thus the theme of your life, the nature of your soul, and the musical qualities of the songs you resonate with all share correspondence.

Musical Texture

Music encodes the soul’s responses to certain themes of experience, or realms. But how does it do so? Let’s examine the components of music, starting with texture.

Texture conveys information about the setting, atmosphere, and origin of a sound. Consider the sound of a wine glass being struck by a fork versus the beep of a fire alarm at the same pitch. The same musical note can evoke different settings, atmospheres, and origins via different textures. Texture cues the brain into invoking sensory data linked by association to that texture.

This association happens in several ways:

Conditioning: If the ding of a wine glass was previously associated with good times at a banquet, that texture might invoke a sense of celebration, elegance, and happiness. But it could just as well invoke terror if the association were built through a traumatic experience.

Instinct: Nails on a chalkboard invokes a visceral reaction at a deep physiological level. The loud roar of a lion, the gruff yell of an angry man, or the sharp hiss of a snake are understood at an instinctual level to signify danger, and hence babies will cry at these sounds without having previously experienced harm from them. There is something evolutionarily coded into our biology, or even into our collective unconscious, that makes us respond to certain textures in certain ways. It’s the sonic equivalent to fear of snakes and spiders in people who have never been hurt by one.

Resemblance: When one sound’s texture resembles that of another, the traits of the latter are associated with the first. For example, the texture of a distorted guitar is similar to that of sizzling oil, rushing waters, or the roar of a crowd, thus it evokes impressions of energy and power. The bassoon’s texture is similar to the voice of someone with a stuffy nose, hence the bassoon evokes nose-oriented imagery such as a bumbling gnome with a large nose.

What constitutes texture exactly? It has to do with the unique fingerprint of harmonic overtones that ride atop the fundamental frequency of a tone and how these evolve or decay over time. Some digital synthesizers use this principle to combine multiple frequencies (fundamentals and harmonics) to create a unique texture emulating that of a flute, piano, guitar, trumpet, and so on.

Two sounds that share the same pitch have the same fundamental frequency, but their harmonic fingerprints differ. A wine glass or tuning fork have a pure fundamental with few overtones, while a distorted guitar will have many overtones and thus sound thicker or richer at the same pitch.

Texture is further conveyed by sound’s reverberation. Reverb’ is similar to echo. A sound played in a large stone cathedral will have a long, rich, dense reverb versus the same sound played in an elevator. Reverb is produced by a change in the sound’s harmonic overtone structure as it interacts with the environment. Stone, metal, wood, plastic, leather, and cloth all absorb and reflect sound differently, subtracting certain overtones from a sound before reflecting it back. The distance and angle of these surfaces further modifies the amplitude and timing of the individual overtones being reflected. Thus the reflections are altered in a unique way according to type of space the sound is played in. This cues the brain into imagining the nature of that space, and hence the setting and atmosphere. So reverb is another aspect of texture, one that paints a picture of the space in which the tone is sounded.

So when you hear a warbling piano with lots of reverb, you might think of an old piano playing in a large dilapidated building which, by the associations built up via all the horror movies we’ve seen, gives an impression of creepiness, ghosts, haunted houses and such.

Texture isn’t really a fundamental musical element, it merely accessorizes a song by providing informational cues about how it should be interpreted. Music is not even a requirement, as texture alone can turn a momentary tone into vivid imagery via association. Therefore texture by itself is not capable of directly resonating the soul; at best it might induce an objective visceral reaction in the body, e.g. nails on a chalkboard. Most of the time, though, texture is an associative device, a sign that points.

However, the soul can resonate with the theme of experience represented by a particular setting and atmosphere, which themselves may be associatively evoked by sound’s texture. So if your soul resonates with themes of monastic spiritual living, then the texture of a choirboy singing a note in a space that sounds like a cathedral may appeal to you. The resonance you feel is not with the musical structure of that sung note, but the context that its texture represents.

If we wish to discover what within music produces direct resonance in the soul, we have to turn off the texture to prevent associative cueing from acting as a substitute. If a song can draw out the same feelings even when performed solely by something as elementary as sine waves, then it must contain something intrinsic to its musical structure that stirs corresponding points of resonance in the soul.

Harmony

Of the four components (texture, rhythm, melody and harmony) it is melody and harmony that resonate the soul directly. Melody occurs when tones are played in sequence, harmony when they are played simultaneously. Melody tells a story, harmony gives the context or backdrop for that story’s events. Together they encode a particular theme of experience, namely the “story of your life” mentioned before.

If we produce a single tone, or note, little is evoked because it lacks context and variation. It just is. But when two notes are sounded together, each provides context for the other. This combination is known as an interval, the simplest of harmonies. More complex harmonies involve more notes played simultaneously, and these are called chords.

In harmony, the frequencies involved comprise a certain ratio. If one tone consists of air vibrations that oscillate at 200 cycles per second and the other at 300 cycles per second, together they comprise a 2:3 frequency ratio. It is this ratio or interval that carries a certain feeling when perceived. The 2:3 ratio (perfect fifth interval) has a regal and powerful feeling, 4:5 (major third interval) a merry one, and 5:6 (minor third) a somber or melancholy color.

Example 2: Sine wave of a single note, two notes forming a minor third interval, three notes forming a minor chord. Same sequence repeated with piano.

Chords, in being made of several notes or intervals stacked atop one another, evoke an even richer palette of feelings… up to a point. From a metaphysical perspective, the purest interval is unison, which is not really an interval but a single frequency. Two tones in unison have the same pitch and are therefore One. The next simplest interval, 1:2 is the octave, representing the “As Above, So Below” principle. The subsequent intervals of 2:3, 3:4, 4:5, etc. increasingly move towards sounding dissonant for they are increasing distortions away from One (1:1). Readers of the Law of One series will be familiar with the concept of distortion.

Same with chords; the more complex the chord, the more dissonance and impure ratios are involved. By the time we get to seventh, ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth chords we are quite far away from the metaphysical realm and now firmly in the arena of life entrenched in the physical domain. These chords evoke feelings that resonate the soul’s contortions to life in 3D. These chords have “character” the same way a person “who has been through some things” or a banged up rusty car is said to have character. It’s no surprise that blues, jazz, and classic rock make frequent use of these chords.

If even further intervals were added so that a chord consisted of dozens if not hundreds of notes at the strangest and most dissonant of intervals, that represents distortion so far away from divinity that it begins sounding like matter itself; in fact, atoms, molecules, stars, and planets give off vibrations that exhibit this character.

To recap, harmony in the absence of melody, rhythm, and texture can still evoke a feeling in the soul as evidenced by a minor interval or chord sounding sad and a major one happy. How is it that sadness is encoded by just two numbers: 5 and 6? Isn’t it amazing that something as seemingly subjective, rich, and profound as human emotion is inextricably linked to something as cold, objective, and intellectual as mathematics? That’s the paradox of music. Clearly, music is a bridge between physics and metaphysics.

Melody

Whereas harmony is the vertical stacking of tones, melody is their sequential arrangement. Melody depends on time since the notes come one after another and each carries a certain duration. Therefore melodies automatically have some element of rhythm as well. As explained earlier, rhythm is associated with the physical body. It parallels the pumping of the heart, the repetition of breath, the pounding of the feet upon the pavement, the movement of hands in the air, and the pacing of speech. Faster song tempos are known to speed these up, slower tempos can slow them down.

Note that linear time and physical bodies are the two things that together define what it means to have a corporeal existence. You have a body with all its rhythmic biological patterns and you live life from one event to the next. Thus melody and rhythm are the two aspects of music that parallel experience in the physical and etheric planes.

Harmony is Transcendental

Pure harmony, on the other hand, is timeless and bodiless. The ratio between two frequencies is a dimensionless constant. It is independent of time, space, dimension, and scale. It doesn’t matter whether the frequencies are low or high, whether the vibration takes place in air, water, or aether. A ratio is a ratio regardless of these variables. Even on the surface of a black hole where space has contracted to zero and time to infinity, ratio remains intact.

Thus harmony and its associated feelings are transcendental; they exist beyond space and time. That is how harmony can reach upward through the levels of existence and stimulate the higher half of the soul, namely the astral body, which unlike the etheric body is independent of linear time and space.

Harmony is an astral language. The astral body is known in occult lore to contain archetypal patterns, and presumably each has a corresponding musical pattern. These archetypal patterns are precisely the soul resonance characteristics discussed earlier.

When one harmony progresses into another, that represents a change in the state of the astral body, whether due to some experience evoking a certain response or the soul undergoing a shift in perception of a given situation.

Whereas melodies chronicle the external events of life, harmonies describe the inner subtext as well as the behind-the-veil metaphysical context for those experiences. Harmony provides the inner stream of consciousness, melody the visual storyboard.

Context is important. To illustrate, a happy melodic progression matched with sad underlying harmony encodes sorrow lurking beneath lighthearted appearances. Someone is striving for victory and putting on a smile but deep down they know it’s all in vain; the ending is tragedy. This bittersweet juxtaposition is a potent device used in many songs.

Example 5: How context affects the interpretation of a melody. First, a simple melody using the major scale. Then the same melody accompanied by major chords. Then by minor ones.

So melody and harmony respectively encode inner and outer streams of experience. The manner in which these play off each other captures the essence of a particular realm. If you resonate with certain music, you are resonating with the realm it embodies, and that says something about your soul.

Monophonic Music

Not all cultures employ rich harmony in their traditional music. Some only emphasize melody and rhythm. This kind of music is called monophonic, meaning melody without accompanying harmonic progressions.

One example is Indian classical music, where a lone melody plays atop a steady drone. Other examples of monophonic music include Irish bagpipes, some forms of Tuvan throat singing, early Medieval liturgical chants, and some Turkish and Middle Eastern music. Nowadays it can also be found in a good portion of electronic tracks centered on rhythm and texture rather than melody and harmony; these tracks fill the sonic void with an underlying drone or rhythmic monophonic bass line.

In traditional monophonic music, the drone acts as a fixed point of reference allowing the melody to be more clearly distinguished. Without it, notes in a melody are either heard in relation to one another, or relative to an imagined base line that might be different from the one the songwriter intended.

For example, the notes C and D# are a minor third interval apart, and played together they create a melancholic effect. When they are played sequentially, then in absence of any other musical cues the brain juxtaposes the second note with its memory of the first, and the effect is like playing both together; it evokes the same sadness. If we now add in a low fixed drone of pitch C and play the sequence again, the sad effect remains.

Example 7: C and D# played together, then C and D# alternating, then C and D# alternating with low C underneath it, then C and D# alternating with low G# beneath instead, then repeated in polyphonic style with some arpeggios to emphasize the difference.

But if we change the drone to G# and repeat the experiment, now the sad effect disappears. Why? Because the brain no longer juxtaposes drone C with note D# as before to make a sad sounding minor third. Rather it first hears the interval G#:C (perfect fourth) and then G#:D# (perfect fifth) — neither of which sound sad. Thus the drone functions as a “tonal center” that gives orientation to a melody. A different tonal center gives a different interpretation of a melody.

Atonal Music

Melodies that have no tonal center and whose notes have no obvious relation to each other, have no musicality or harmony, whether explicit by the stacking of tones, or implied by the juxtaposition of sequential notes in memory. If harmony is associated with the astral body and melody with the etheric, then atonal music represents a body devoid of both. It is a series of events not threaded through by any conscious and emotional perception. Recall how in some science fiction films, the noises a robot or computer makes was typically a random series of beeps, representative of the machine’s lack of sentience or humanity.

It doesn’t matter if the notes are chosen according to some abstract mathematical principle; if the principle does not pertain to those active within spirit, soul, and body then the result is not musical. If someone were to cook a meal made from periodic table elements whose atomic numbers follow the fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89) that would be incredibly innovative and pay homage to the golden spiral principle of nature, but it wouldn’t be food and you would slowly die from eating it. And yet, humans are adept at developing acquired tastes for that which kills them slowly, such as alcohol and tobacco, and the same may be said of certain music.

Is it surprising then, that atonal music came into vogue in the late 19th and early 20th century during the heights of the industrial revolution and scientific materialism? Its appeal is primarily one of intellectual intrigue and identity, but the factor of soul resonance remains absent except for attempts by some to induce a sense of fear, alienation, and anxiety through dissonance.

Polyphonic Music

Compared to Eastern monophonic music, most Western music since the Renaissance period is polyphonic and makes great use of harmony. Intervals interweave and/or chords progress with the melodies played atop them. Whereas in monophonic music the tonal baseline is fixed, here the baseline changes as desired, and so the orientation of a given melody changes accordingly. The same melody can be given different perspectives depending on which chords accompany it.

To listeners used to monophonic music, the shifting baseline or changing tonal center of polyphonic music creates an unsettling, ungrounded, vertiginous effect. There are some profound mysteries contained in this. As it turns out, cultures that enjoy monophonic music also happen to be ones that place greatest importance on tradition and cultural stability. The constant tone subliminally represents the keynote of their culture, the line that every generation walks. It may be said that the tonal center is the keystone of a given realm, the prime numerical index that distinguishes that realm from another. This is no more evident than in Hinduism where the syllable “Om” is said to be the underlying drone of reality, the vibration that gives rise to our manifested existence. It is the hum of the Logos as it sings Creation into existence cymatically through the Demiurge.

Key Modulation

So then, what does it mean for a tonal center to change? If each tonal center is the baseline of its own realm, then a change represents a transition from one realm to another.

Notice how the same life event can be viewed from different perspectives depending on what realm or perspective your consciousness is rooted in. If you are rooted in materialism and vanity, then losing your body in a boating accident will be devastating. If you are rooted instead in your higher spiritual mind, you might see this as the natural conclusion to a well-planned curriculum. In the same way, a melody can take on different hues depending on its underlying harmony and tonal center.

Now, given any pitch, you can build a scale of notes upon multiplying its frequency by various ratios. This pitch then becomes the tonal center (or tonic) of that scale. By stacking various notes of that scale, you can create chords. Both the scale and chords are rooted in that tonal center. So when a song is said to be “in the key of C major,” that means its tonal center is C and the scale from which the chords and melodies are built happens to be the major scale.

Example 10: How the key of C major sounds. First the familiar do re mi scale (major scale), then a polyphonic ditty using both scales and chords of that key.

In contrast, monophonic music keeps the same key throughout a song, sounds the tonic constantly, and plays only one melodic line. The complete opposite is true for polyphonic music. It may change key, not always sound the tonic, may stack notes into chords, and play several interweaving melodies at once.

When the key changes throughout a song, that is known as key modulation; it means shifting the aforementioned tonal center throughout a song, sometimes even within the same melody or musical phrase. Melodies themselves can stray outside the scale they started in. A melody might go up in the happy sounding major scale and descend in the sad sounding minor scale. The chords accompanying the melody might also shift from one key to another while this occurs, if so desired.

Example 11: Non-modulating compared to modulating. Notice how the non-modulating example sounds a bit boring and conventional, while the modulating example sounds more interesting but odd.

The Power of Polyphonic Music

Modulation is the transitioning between musical universes. It takes you out of one realm into another.

The most rudimentary form of modulation, frequently used in pop ballads, is where a chorus repeats but raised in pitch by some interval. This is humorously termed the “trucker’s gear shift.” It’s a cliche we’ve all heard: just when you think the song couldn’t get any more sappy, it jumps in pitch (usually after a dramatic pause) and that’s when the camera pans to some woman in the audience shedding a tear while the crowd cheers and the vocalist wails on. The raising of the tonal center parallels breaking the sound barrier and entering an altogether new level of intensity. That is only one example of modulation.

Example 12: The "truck driver's gear change" or "trucker's gear shift", an overused single-step modulation employed in pop music to make people squeal and clap and cry. Apologies for the samples. Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You, Bon Jovi - Livin' On A Prayer, Michael Bolton - How Can We Be Lovers?

When a melody remains in the same scale and its accompanying chords progress in the same key, the song stays bounded in the same realm. Every resonance this song induces in the soul belongs to the same set. These resonances parallel experiences that take place in only one realm. It has its uses, but can be a bit one dimensional. Monophonic music is an extreme form of this.

It makes sense, then, that Western civilization has seen the greatest turnover in cultural, political, scientific, and social paradigms. Just consider how much has changed since the late Middle Ages, since the birth of polyphonic music in Western culture. Western society is not a monophonic culture that holds steadfastly to an ancient drone and remains anchored in one realm. It is as volatile as its music.

Since modulation involves movement from one chord or interval to another of a different scale and/or tonal center, then since there are many chords and intervals, there are an even greater number of possible modulations. And every one of these modulations carries its own unique feel as well.

Example 13: Sequence of chords in C Major that do not modulate, then sequence of chords where every chord is in a different key from the one before it.

So in addition to simple intervals or chords each having their own feel, a particular transition from one to another also has a unique feel, and that includes transitions from a chord in one key or musical universe to another. The profound implication is that since even the latter can induce resonance in the soul, then in some way the soul must be familiar with transition between realms.

The trucker’s gear shift is popular because it represents the reaching of a new plateau in life, which on Earth typically means reaching a new level of success, realization, or triumph. That is a peak experience that many souls incarnating here seem to be striving for. It’s the transition from a lesser to a more exciting realm of experience. Since this is such a common theme among human incarnations, the potential to resonate with the corresponding modulation is equally common. Hence its use in pop music to build and amplify sentimentality and thus revenue.

Other modulations are less familiar. Going from C:G to C#:F# (or E:B to F:A# as in the example) has a dark, mystical, occult feel to it. This is partly due to the involvement of an interval known as the augmented fourth, basis of the tritone chord which the medieval Church banned for sounding too diabolical.

Example 14: The tritone chord, which the church banned. Then the augmented fourth interval it's based on. These are highly dissonant and truly evil or foreboding sounding. The proper way to use them, however, is via E:B to F:A# as illustrated in this example, where E->A# and B->F are augmented fourths, yet together they lose their dissonance and become otherworldly. Played in this way, one hears the pinnacle of modulation, maximum otherworldliness. That may be what the Church really wanted to ban, namely the stimulation of transcendent impulses. In this example, the chord sequence is repeated with varying emphasis on certain notes so that you can hear the pairs of augmented fourths. Then follows a clip from my song Deep Black Lake where I use this sequence.

Whatever experience this modulation parallels, it is not something confined to the Earthly domain. But the fact that we can respond to it at all shows that our souls have endured exposure to dark, mystical, occult realms. If we really enjoy that feeling, then the resonance must be particularly intense, and perhaps we have a foot in that otherworld. If we merely feel odd and shrink away from it, then maybe we’ve caught glimpses of those realms and much prefer the comfort of our life back home.

Hence, we frequently find the tritone or C:G to C#:F# modulation used in gothic, black, or doom metal but almost never in country music or pop ballads because the latter are firmly planted in everyday life on Earth. Note that the tritone or augmented fourth is only diabolic when sounded simultaneously or played as a melody in the same key, for that juxtaposition brings out its inherent dissonance. Dark music uses this to imply doom or dread. But in a modulating sequence such as C:G to C#:F#, two augmented fourths (one going low to high, the other high to low) end up neutralizing each other like some matter-antimatter collision, generating instead an eerie musical wormhole between realms. That is why this chord sequence is the very epitome of realm transition.

Strange modulations may also be found in horror and fantasy film soundtracks. The Harry Potter theme by John Williams tries really hard to modulate in a manner evoking a sense of occultism, magic, and mystical wonder.

Other modulation are merely strange in an innocent elfin, elemental, or sylvan way. One example is C:E to D#:G. Since these are two major third (happy) intervals with no evil tritone to be found among them, they are otherworldly but in a more lighthearted sense.

Example 1: C:E to D#:G an elfin modulation, then same with an accompanying flute melody to enhance the effect.

The Power of Monophonic Music

That is not to say monophonic music with its absence of harmony and modulation is inferior. What it lacks in ability to stir the astral body, it gains in stimulating the etheric and physical bodies. There is a secret science to monophony that allows it to alter physicality through manipulation of the etheric intermediary, or alter physiology through deep level manipulation of neural circuitry and the etheric body.

The frequency and texture of a tone is known to affect the growth of plants and the health of the human body for better or worse. Hindu and Chinese legends speak of music being used to alter the weather and even induce human combustion. Gurdjieff discussed “objective music” and “inner octaves.” In the opening scene to Gurdjieff’s biopic Meetings with Remarkable Men we see a musician resonating canyon stones into full agitation via overtone singing; perhaps the filmmaker knew something about that technique. Overtone singing is the humming of a note and changing of the mouth/teeth/lip position to filter out certain harmonics, creating the effect of a high-pitched melody wandering atop a drone, just like with bagpipes. Asian overtone singing and Irish bagpipes are likely vestigial holdovers from a time when monophony was used to manipulate physical matter. Tibetan monks have allegedly demonstrated levitating a heavy boulder several hundred feet into the air using the power of sound.

As the drone is sounded, each note in a melody forms a certain interval with respect to it. Some intervals we are familiar with, such as the 5:6 frequency ratio comprising the sad minor third interval. Other intervals sound like the tuning is off, but really they consist of the drone plus a microtonal note that isn’t in our twelve tone chromatic scale, which according to Hindu music theory nonetheless has a definite and unique color or impact.

The melodies in monophonic music usually pass through such intervals quite quickly without dwelling on them to where harmony becomes prominent. The listener hears the melody first and foremost. This allows for the sonic equivalent of acupuncture, where each note is like a needle positioned on a specific meridian point to activate a certain function. To treat a condition, acupuncture uses a set of such needles on meridian points related to that condition. Likewise the Hindu songs known as ragas use a specific scale and rhythmic pattern known to collectively have specific effects on the listener.

All of these feats were accomplished through monophonic music. As mentioned, melody affects the etheric and physical bodies and pertains to events of the exterior world. Those with occult knowledge have taken this principle to an extreme to heal or harm the body and to manipulate matter, energy, space, and time.

As you can see, even without harmony, music can be quite powerful when engineered according to a secret science. Without this science, music is imprecise or accidental in its objective effects.

But what this secret science consists of, exactly, remains a mystery. Nonetheless, Alain Daniélou has contributed much to its decipherment. In his book “Music and the Power of Sound,” Daniélou shows how Hindu, Greek, Arabic, Chinese, and Western musical systems all derive from a common meta-system. For example, the notes, scales, and chords used in Western music are but small subset of all the ones available in this meta-system. Arabic music chooses a different subset, Chinese yet another.

Indian classical music is the most sophisticated and complete, for it uses notes that don’t even exist in Western music theory. It employs microtones, which are notes that reside between the notes we know. This is what Gurdjieff meant by “inner octaves”, namely the spectrum of microtones between notes.

At best, Western music uses microtones in a crude way when accenting notes by bending, slurring, or vibrating them. Drummers do an equivalent technique with rhythm when they purposely play ahead or behind a beat on certain notes, thereby altering the rhythm in microscopic ways in order to impart a subliminal groove that makes an otherwise clinical beat come alive. Such accents add a sense of passion to music. Good artists make use of both microtonal and microtiming variations to put “soul” and “groove” into the music they play. [This directly parallels the subtle expansion and contraction of electron orbitals in atoms that accompanies the production and absorption of longitudinal or scalar waves, which are biologically and etherically active (literally the ghost in the shell). These expansions or contractions are beneath the threshold of what would trigger a jump in orbit and the production or absorption of a regular transverse EM wave (photons), hence their effects are sub-electromagnetic, sub-quantum, or virtual. The same can be done in music by subtly bending the timing or pitch from its common value, as opposed to deviating all the way which would simply produce another common note or beat].

It is precisely this passion that Hindu monophonic music aims to tap with its bending of notes and the use of microtones foreign to Western music. However, this passion is not quite the same as the full bodied feelings that only harmony brings. It takes place at a different level of the soul, a more instinctual or reflexive rather than introspective level. The “passion” and “soul” response arises at the border between the etheric and astral, which is not quite at the level stimulated by sweeping emotions and epic archetypal themes resonated by harmony and modulation in polyphonic music. Rather, without any pejorative connotations implied, it’s more at the visceral reflexive level of what animals feel. Animals have etheric and astral bodies, but their astral bodies are not as developed as those of humans. That is why human feelings comprise a superset of what cats and dogs experience.

The melodic and rhythmic accents that monophonic music adds to notes in order to create feeling and passion, these share a mechanism in common with animal vocalizations. We can understand cat meows because such accents are relatively universal to mammals. We can tell a sad meow from a happy one, from a question mark, from an exclamation mark, from an impassioned groan, and so on. We share those same inflections integrated into our speech; think of all the ways “hmm” can be vocalized to convey different meanings. Rock and blues vocals place heavy emphasis on such inflections to convey attitude, passion, or agony sort of like moaning cats or growling dogs, only with lyrics.

Interestingly, dogs howl to drawn out notes and cats will respond to certain melodic inflections played on a guitar but neither will respond to intervals, harmonies, or chord progressions. Yet humans respond to all of these. It stands to reason that there are even higher beings whose feelings are supersets of ours, who can feel things most humans cannot. And yet, their feelings ought to be encodable in music as well. If you were to hear such music, perhaps non-human feelings could be stimulated in you if they happen to be present within your soul in embryonic or residual form. Maybe that is what certain strange sounding modulations achieve.

Ancient Music

In Hindu music, the scale of notes and their timing, slurring, and vibrato are highly intentional and specific. Research suggests the ancient Vedic culture received their knowledge and heritage from the Aryan Hittites that invaded India in the first millennium B.C. (see the works of L.A. Waddell). These Hittites descended from even earlier proto-Hittite-Phoenician-Amorites who possessed global navigation and megalithic technology and thus surely knew the secret science of sound. They also founded the ancient Mayan, Chinese, Minoan, Sumerian, and Egyptian civilizations and were possessors of vast knowledge in mathematics, music, and other arts and sciences.

The meta-system of music that Daniélou investigated may have been known for several thousand years, but cultural fragmentation produced musical fragmentation away from the meta-system. Perhaps this was done on purpose. Maybe Western music was covertly turned into eventual polyphonic form, with equal temperament tuning making feasible the playing of harmony in various keys, in order to induce rapid cultural, social, political, and scientific turnover. Maybe if Europe had stayed with monophony, we’d still be riding donkeys.

In ancient China, music was heavily regulated to ensure that all instruments were tuned to a particular tonal center and only certain scales were used. This perpetuated the stability of the civilization. It’s said that when foreign musicians became popular in a region, or local musicians decided to innovate and play other scales, the local culture suffered a decline in order, health, and morality.

Plato was aware of this problem as well, complaining that “our music was once divided into its proper forms. It was not permitted to exchange the melodic styles of these established forms and others. Knowledge and informed judgment penalized disobedience. There were no whistles, unmusical mob-noises, or clapping for applause. The rule was to listen silently and learn; boys, teachers, and the crowd were kept in order by threat of the stick. But later, an unmusical anarchy was led by poets who had natural talent, but were ignorant of the laws of music. Through foolishness they deceived themselves into thinking that there was no right or wrong way in music, that it was to be judged good or bad by the pleasure it gave.”

Classical Music

This naturally brings into question the effects of modern and even classical music. It may come as a surprise that not all Western classical music is good and healthy. Each style of classical targeted its respective zones within the soul, some higher or lower than others. Starting from a high point during the late Medieval and Renaissance times, the spiritual integrity of both culture and music declined in a systematic way over the subsequent centuries.

The Medieval period spans from 400 to 1400 AD and encompasses the rise of Merovingians and the Kings of Britain, historical events pertaining to the Holy Grail, the proliferation of chivalry and alchemy, spread of various Gnostic sects, construction of the Gothic cathedrals, and rise and fall of the Templars. It also included the Catholic Inquisition and the Crusades.

Early Medieval music was monophonic. The official “sacred” music of the time consisted of plainsong sanctioned by the Church, which was neither sacred nor musical in the true sense. Gregorian chants, for example, were intentionally minimalistic and plain so as to avoid stimulating the soul and spirit, which might have awakened individualistic “pagan” feelings that could undermine the absolute spiritual authority of the Church.

Early Medieval secular music, however, was influenced by Arabic and Persian cultures, whose societies were experiencing a golden age at the time Europe was still climbing out of the Dark Ages. Therefore Medieval secular music had Middle-Eastern elements, though with lyrical themes centered around courtly love and heroic deeds. The gnostic troubadours and minnesingers who were propagators of the Grail legends sang in this style.

So all in all, the cultural highlights of the Medieval period were purity, sacredness, devotion, and chivalry. These are the same themes found in Iranian, Indian, Scandinavian, and other Indo-European traditions that trace back to the ancient proto-Hittite-Phoenician-Amorite civilization (4,000 BC to 1500 BC) mentioned earlier and discussed in my Gnosis series as being the original bearers of the Grail stone.

Basic forms of harmony developed by 800-900 AD though complex polyphony took several more centuries to mature. The Church adopted what was in vogue and consequently liturgical music became polyphonic. So although the Church became the primary vehicle for such sacred polyphony, spiritual and gnostic undercurrents covertly bubbled up through that oppressive framework. And not only in music but also in literature and art, as evidenced by the Grail stories that carried Christian themes on the surface but were gnostic and hyperborean at the core, or the alchemical themes encoded in the various statues and reliefs of the Gothic cathedrals.

This kind of polyphonic music, which flourished in the late Medieval period and evolved to perfection in the Renaissance and early Baroque, focused on harmony of the highest order and thereby sought to stimulate the upper reaches of the astral body closest to spirit. For once, sacred music resonated the capacity for spiritual devotion through pure harmonies and melodies.

Perhaps the same body of secret sciences behind the sacred geometry of the cathedrals, or the alchemical tinting of their stained glass windows, also engendered the polyphony performed therein. This may have been an act of occult warfare aimed at undermining the tyranny of the Church. Like uploading a virus to the mothership, by injecting a transcendent, gnostic, individualistic element into Church architecture and music, it would only be a matter of time before that became the new cultural keynote.

Indeed, that is exactly what happened during the Renaissance (1400-1600) when individual development to the highest divine, artistic, philosophical, and intellectual potential took on greater importance than austere submission to the Church. Instead of an aloof spirituality, the Renaissance added a more personal human dimension to the divine. The focal point thereby shifted from spirit to the spirit-astral boundary where the higher ego resides. The higher ego represents one’s highest potential. This was the spiritual height of Western music, the golden mean between above and below where complexity did not come at the expense of divinity. Such music reached its zenith around 1500 with the Franco-Flemish style of sacred and secular polyphony.

In the subsequent centuries, virtuosity and excellence became idolized to the point of intellectual hubris. Hence the Renaissance was followed by the Age of Enlightenment (1600-1800) where reason became the highest of virtues and anything superstitious or mystical took a back seat. Science eclipsed philosophy and chemistry displaced alchemy. This was a counter-reaction to the tyrannical nature of the Church during the preceding centuries. But in doing so, it increasingly threw the baby out with the bathwater and discarded mystical, sacred, spiritual impulses as being symptomatic of religious ignorance.

The musical styles associated with the Age of Enlightenment, known as Baroque and Classical, placed less emphasis on sacred spiritual impulses than exploring the technical heights of what could be done with Western music theory that nonetheless produced something intelligible, logical, and pleasing. While early Baroque still possessed the spiritual virtues of the Renaissance, by the late Baroque and Classical periods the focus had shifted entirely from the higher to the lower ego, or intellect. It may have been the most intricate music ever written, but it lacked a certain numinous glow.

In counter-reaction to the insipid intellectualism and conventions of the Classical period, next came the Romantic period (1800-1900) whose aim was to evoke strong emotions and sentimentality. Rich harmonies, textures, and melodies together stimulated the inner emotional life, stirring up yearnings and passions. However it stimulated only the middle and lower regions of the astral body, either directly or via association.

Whereas Baroque and Classical were melodic, pleasing, and memorable because they still respected the natural laws of music, Romanticism went against convention, broke the rules of music theory established up to that point, and dove into the darker regions of human existence. This was the first time that elements from the lower astral planes — the demented, twisted, delirious, demonic, angry, lustful energies and entities there — could potentially enter into classical music. For better or worse, Beethoven channeled his astral body into his works and thereby gave them a fierce astral nature, almost to the point of luciferian mania in certain pieces.

Example 21: Excerpts from Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 (1808). Beethoven was the first truly modern composer in the sense of tapping into astral currents that had not been put into music before, and which are quite active in music nowadays.

This era also romanticized earlier cultural themes such as the Grail legend, but in lacking the spiritual influences behind these original themes, all it could do was caricaturize. Classic example is Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, an epic opera loosely based on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Grail poem from the 1200s.

Wagner took Romanticism to its logical conclusion by abandoning melodic and harmonic elegance and simplicity in favor of textures so rich and chords so complex (in an attempt to express power, emotion, and epic themes in an associative way) that what unwittingly resulted was a kind of astral “heat death,” a drowning in sentimentality, a smearing of emotions into an amorphous nebula of hysteria. Consider his famous Tristan chord, which consisted of the augmented 4th (horror, fear), Minor 3rd (human sadness), and Augmented 6th (nostalgia). It’s the sound of a languished soul longing for better days. No wonder Lars von Trier chose to use it throughout the film Melancholia.

Example 22: Wagner's famous Tristan chord, from the prelude in Tristan and Isolde (1865). First is an excerpt from the beginning of the prelude, then the ending.

Impressionism then arose in the late 1800s as a reaction to the pompous, gaudy, melodramatic sentimentality of Romanticism. Its goal was to be subtle and subliminal in its effects upon the listener. Impressionism did away with memorable melodies and traditional harmonies. Rather, it abandoned music in favor of using sound to stimulate reactions that took place beneath the threshold of consciousness, thereby producing certain moods or atmospheres that couldn’t always be put into words.

One could say Impressionism was an attempt at objective music, but only at the physiological level and haphazardly without knowledge of the exact science behind it. The same way Impressionist art focused on light, Impressionist music focused on sound; both sought to bring art and music down to the level of sensory stimulus.

So by the turn of the 20th century, the only thing left was to throw out all conventions and purposely make nothing resembling traditional music. This was practiced by Arnold Schoenberg and others of the Atonal / Expressionist movement. Atonal “music” aims to produce sounds that have no followable tonal center. No note is afforded any easily identifiable harmonic or melodic connection to any other note, the only emotion intended to be aroused was continuous fear and anxiety through relentless dissonance.

Example 24: Arnold Schoenberg - String Quartet No. 4

While some might enjoy it intellectually for its novelty and even develop an acquired taste for it, at the core it remains music stripped of musicality, like a body stripped of its soul. In the end, it expressed what came to define the early 20th century: materialism, nihilism, rebellion, brutality, destruction, chaos, terror, suffering, death, and loss of spiritual consciousness.

Occult Trajectory

Though simplified, the above history illustrates how Western music follows a trajectory from the highest heights to the lowest lows: spirit giving way to intellect, intellect to sentiment, and sentiment to unconsciousness and chaos. Or in Rudolf Steiner’s terms, it followed a trajectory from Christ to Ahriman to Lucifer to Sorat. All this within five centuries. The focal points trace a linear descent down the spirit, mind, astral, etheric, and physical layers of the human being. Mere coincidence?

Every movement was a reaction to the preceding one, just one step down in the metaphysical scale. Problem, reaction, solution. This dialectic synthesis generated progressively devolving states that ultimately amounted to a triumph of matter over spirit.

It should now be clear that the devolution of classical music has either paralleled, or directly engendered, a systematic decline of Western civilization.

Modern Music

Classical music was limited by the technology of its day. The pipe organ was the closest thing to powered machinery since it ran on steam, and the old masters used it prolifically. If electric and digital instruments had been available, they would have been used. Today we have not only the traditional instruments available to us, but all the new ones afforded by modern technology. And not only can modern musicians invoke the styles of past centuries, but they may employ newer ones and even fuse various styles and juxtapose instruments of different eras.

Therefore today’s music is a superset of the old rather than a mere sequel. It is a “Resurrection” of the old, augmented by the new. The same principles, wellsprings of inspiration, and occult influences that animated old music are still available to us, provided the musician can tap into them. Further, we now have additional influences that did not exist back then, at least not to the same degree. Good or bad, this means music today is capable of more: more divinity, more otherworldliness, more power, more intricacy, more texture, more rhythm, more elegance, but also more darkness, more demonism, more aggression, or more manipulation depending on the musician’s intent.

It’s beyond the scope of this article to analyze the archetypal basis and metaphysical effects of every modern genre and subgenre. However, these are easy enough to determine from the lyrics and graphics accompanying the music, for these are not normally in contradiction. For instance, there are no country albums about knights fighting dragons, rap albums about pickup trucks and old dirt roads, or reggae albums about a robot apocalypse. Lounge and jazz reflect urban socialite living, metal reflects various permutations of power, punk reflects youth and rebellion, etc. and the reason why a genre reflects a given archetype or realm of experience goes back to the objective resonance and subjective association factors explained earlier.

Music since the early 1900s has diversified into hundreds of genres and subgenres. The diversity is so immense that we cannot categorically dismiss modern music simply for being modern; too many factors are at play.

Some factors are due to the novelty of the times. There are electronic styles owing their distinction to the capabilities afforded by synthesizers and samplers. And metal could not have arisen without the invention of electric guitars and high gain amplifiers. New cultural elements have entered into the equation as well, such as African work songs, voodoo rhythms, and brothel music that became the basis of blues, Jazz, and derivative genres. The difference between European and American styles of pop, jazz, rock, metal, etc. is due to greater Africanization of the latter in the 20th century.

Other factors are metaphysical. Some musicians may be drawing subconscious inspiration from past or future lives, perhaps focusing on Medieval elements in their works because they still share a strong connection with that life and time period. There are neoclassical composers who, in having the benefit of historical hindsight, are able to outdo the old masters and produce even more beautiful and numinous works. An unexpected and under appreciated but noteworthy example is modern video game soundtracks. It all depends on what realms they are tapping into.

Some artists may have had past lives as aliens, or they might be angelic beings in human form, and their music contains an otherworldly element that resonates other people who might also have had past life connections with that realm. Through psionic linkage established between artist and audience, and through the resonance characteristics of the music itself, these artists can broadcast uplifting and liberating energies into the world.

Other music is purely commercial in nature, engineered to appeal to the broadest audiences and extract the most money. That is the definition of pop(ular) music. Some is engineered by political think tanks for propaganda, cultural revolution, or cultural suppression reasons. Then there are individuals possessed by demons or taking part in demonic secret societies who use music as a means of harvesting energy from fans and injecting demonic vibrations into the collective unconscious. They do this through subliminal messages and neurolinguistic programming, through textures, rhythms, melodies, and harmonies that stimulate resonance with the demonic realm, and through employing the song or music video as an occult sigil to psionically link the audience to the demon(s) possessing or shadowing the artist. These have far stronger effects on a listener than, say, whether a song is tuned to A 440Hz or A 432Hz.

Point being that in flipping through the radio or browsing music on the web, you are surveying a sonic microcosm that mirrors the vast macrocosm of beings, realms, dimensions, influences, and energies accessible to human consciousness. Past, future, this world, other worlds, divine, demonic, human, alien, animal, commercial, organic, robotic — it’s all out there right now in musical form, and to a potentially greater intensity and fidelity than ever before attained.

So aside from modern music being mere entertainment, mere fun, mere associative subcultural identification, there is a more serious aspect where music serves as the battleground for competing political, occult, spiritual, and alien influences.

On an individual level, it’s not so much about changing a person into something he is not — because he will detest and refuse to listen to something he neither resonates nor identifies with — but about bringing out the best or worst in him or her. On a collective level, however, an upstanding principled culture can be thoroughly inverted, subverted, and perverted through its music over the span of a few generations because most children are easily enculturated out of evolutionary necessity. As shown above, that agenda has been ongoing for some time.

Future Music

When people think of futuristic music, they typically envision something spacey, electronic, and robotic sounding. It’s natural to assume that the future is an extension of the present, that since the defining feature of modern life is technology, the future will be the same just with even more technology. But that expectation is too encumbered by the shortcomings of scientific materialism and transhumanism, whose one-sided view of existence excludes anything outside mainstream assumptions. There are also metaphysical, alien, occult, and eschatological variables at play that will not only influence the future but outright override the lesser technology factors and create outcomes that completely go against the prevailing assumptions of our times.

As a planet we are approaching a simultaneous convergence of astrophysical cycles, occult trends, metaphysical plans, and alien agendas. This convergence represents a schism or nexus point, a discontinuity in human history that will throw the prevailing order into chaos. From this chaos will arise any number of new orders. Whatever the outcome, over the long term the future will not simply be a linear progression of current technological trends, but rather a full scale precipitation of esoteric/alien/occult factors that for now have remained sub rosa.

The future may be divided into two major phases: the transition between old and new eras, and the new era itself. The new era will be one of peace, enlightenment, and integrity. It will be a new renaissance of the spirit, mind, and soul. Every myth, vision, and prophecy speaks of this Golden Age, this Kingdom of Heaven, this Reign of Wisdom.

However, the transition phase preceding it will be one of superhuman heroism in the face of extreme hardship as the spiritually awakened square off against old and new adversaries who seek to maintain their dominance. The transition will require dealing with the tyrannical death throes of the old power structure, surviving the collapse of civilization, and developing enough knowledge, strength, cohesion, and identity to keep the spiritual flame alive during the next Dark Age. Threats to human sovereignty will evolve from mere political oppression at the very beginning to increasingly cosmic and supernatural opposition near the middle and end. A new chivalric order will arise in response to these challenges. Our powers to deal with these threats will evolve as well, shifting from five-sense methods toward more paranormal, psychic, etheric, spiritual forms of defense and offense. This, as our consciousness, self-knowledge, divine connection, perception, technology, and environment gradually pivot to a higher octave of existence.

If we were to translate the above into music, what would it sound like? Would country music do? Would jazz? Our music would have to be epic, human yet superhuman, powerful, dynamic, transcendental, mysterious, spiritual, and intense.

Modern music devotes too much of itself to realms of experience whose days are numbered: urban life, fashion, celebrity, glamor, materialism, promiscuity, mundanity, etc. Very few genres are even capable of capturing the zeitgeist of what’s to come. For that, we need music whose texture, rhythm, melody, and harmony is anything but small and worldly.

An obvious choice for a texture that embodies power, energy, and dynamism is the distorted tone of an electric guitar. The distortion comes from an overloading of the vacuum tubes inside a guitar amplifier. The signal hitting the tubes is so intense that it surpasses their rated limitations, and so the signal’s waveform distorts and acquires a harder sonic edge. So here we already have the concepts of power, energy, and the transcending of limitations. The resulting sound carries not only the identifiable pitch of the original signal from the guitar, but now has a rich spectrum of harmonic overtones added. Instead of one, there are now many. This captures the essence of power. Cymbals in a drum set likewise consist of a huge spectrum of harmonics, but they lack a well defined fundamental pitch and therefore don’t have the sonic “direction” that a distorted guitar has. The latter embodies the power of many acting under a single purpose. The rushing sound of a massive waterfall, the buzz of a high voltage generator, the roar of a crowd — all of these share in the expression of power.

And hence, the distorted electric guitar tone is the epitome of power, energy, and transcendence. It is the golden mean between the directionality but loneliness of a pure sine wave and the multitudinous but directionless sound of pure noise. That is why all metal music employs the distorted guitar tone, for power is the common denominator of all metal subgenres; the predominant chord metal uses is even called the “power chord”, based on the 2:3 perfect fifth interval, because as mentioned earlier, the perfect fifth by itself already has a regal and powerful sound, which is only enhanced by distortion.

The archetype of power that underlies metal can be filtered or accessorized through various harmonies, melodies, textures, and rhythms to generate the various subgenres of the field. Unfortunately, just as physical power defaults toward violence and destruction in today’s world, so has the power of metal defaulted toward violent and dark applications, but it need not be so. If directed toward the divine realm instead, the result would be an expression of divine power, an archangelic archetype rather than a demonic one. In Indian classical music, the instrument known as a tanpura has a similar texture to the electric guitar and generates a drone that signifies cosmic power.

Aside from expressing power, our music would need to employ modulation to convey the sense of transition between realms. An elegant use of modulation signifies a hyperdimensional state of existence beyond the limits of linear time. What it represents is closer to the domain of aliens, angels, demons, or jinn than the human domain, but that will change as the human race evolves. In life, humans get a faint taste of realm transitions via dreaming, which is a crossing of realms from waking life into the inner dreamscape and back again. To create a song that evokes the essence of dreams without resorting to special textures, you must employ modulating melodies that have a supernatural elegance to them. In fact, music first heard in dreams will often have this very quality. Moving from the old world to new era will be like crossing the waking-dream boundary.

When a song or phrase begins and ends with the same key while modulating in between, that parallels leaving your home and going on an epic journey ending with you back home. How many adventure, fantasy, and science fiction stories have we come across with this theme? The Wizard of Oz is an example. If the modulation is especially otherworldly sounding, then the adventure is a magical one. This encodes the archetype of the hero’s journey, the template that Joseph Campbell discovered was the universal basis of mythology. Mythology itself is a trans-dimensional map of our planetary destiny showing where we came from, who we are, why we’re here, and where we’re going, albeit encoded in symbolic form like a dream. And just as dreams can foreshadow the future, the hero myth foreshadows our own future triumph over ignorance and adversity.

So modulation is essential for encoding the property of transcendence. Done properly, songs that modulate may evoke feelings in us that foreshadow a future time when certain heroic humans transcend the worldly matrix and acquire the otherworldly powers, knowledge, and experience needed to return and help liberate their brethren who are still struggling to transcend.

As for the other impulses active during the transition phase, for the spiritual element we can look to the pure and elegant harmonies of Medieval and Renaissance music. For the celebration of human individuality, the exuberance of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. For the emotional gravitas of hope and tragedy amidst collapse and change, the passionate vocals and epic choirs of the Romantic period. For heroism, valor, and chivalry, perhaps the folk melodies of the Scandinavians or modern operatic metal vocals. For pure power and superhuman caliber, the unmatched energy and power of metal’s guitars and drums.

Combine all these synergistically and employ otherworldly modulation, and you will have an example of something capable of expressing the era of transition.

That doesn’t mean future generations will be listening to precisely this kind of music, only that the most active archetypes of that future can be resonated right now through certain compositions of appropriate scope and splendor. Whether it would stimulate anything in you depends on how much you resonate with those archetypes. In turn, that would depend on who you are, where/when you came from, why you’re here, and where you’re headed in life.

Conclusion

What music we enjoy potentially includes not only our soul resonance characteristics and recurring life themes, but also the more superficial aspects such as cultural/subcultural affiliation and degree of intellectual vs kinesthetic vs emotional centrism.

It would be a mistake, however, to confuse soul resonance with the more mundane factors behind musical preference and therefore draw the wrong conclusions. To reach the soul, a song must pass through the brain’s musical circuitry. If the circuitry is not well developed, the song will never be perceived to the depths necessary to resonate the soul in the first place. In that case, a person’s musical preference may be due more to mundane factors such as association, identity, groove, or intrigue. Many such individuals tend not to have strong musical preferences at all and will listen to just about anything; that’s because their preference doesn’t conditionally follow from their unique soul resonance profiles.

But assuming we can achieve objective insight into the soul based on musical preference, what are the implications? Well, in short it means that we all have spiritual roles that are unique in their idiosyncrasies yet generic in their stemming from just a few archetypes. These archetypes include the warrior, the healer, the wanderer, the trickster, the chieftain, the child, the king, the princess, the knight, the hero, the technician, the alien, the martyr, the observer, etc. These archetypes are what underlie the correspondences between soul, life, and music.

It also means that we are what we are, and we stand for what we stand for. If others acquire perception of our inner archetypes, and we of theirs, that should be no cause for mutual embarrassment, contempt, hubris, or hate. It should only be cause for mutual matter-of-fact acknowledgement and understanding without necessarily betraying our own values and roles, for we must be what we must be.

Topics Not Discussed

Since this article was only a general overview, I did not include the more difficult technical analyses of all the mathematical, occult, and historical facets of music and how to apply them. Many of these I still need to research and experiment with before being able to explain them to my satisfaction.

So here is a list of topics left to explore:

How musical scales and modes (Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aolian, and Locrian) differ in their impacts on the soul.

How modes and scales affect the cultures that employ them.

How scales correspond to the chakras and influence them.

Implications of scales like the minor or major pentatonic having only five notes, and how this correlates to the cultures using them.

How as Rudolf Steiner pointed out, mankind’s preferred mode has progressively shifted over time from Lydian (prehistoric) to Phrygian (Egypt and Greece) to Dorian (Medieval) to the current Ionian mode, with Locrian being the next mode preferred by our descendants.

How we have not yet evolved the ability to perceive the Locrian mode accurately and authentically.

How Locrian is the only mode that uses a tritone in place of the perfect fifth, why this represents a hyperdimensional ability to shift between realms, and how that correlates with what future humans will be like.

A list of intervals, chords, and modulations between chords, and their corresponding color, feel, realm, etc.

A reliable method for modulating between one key and another, toward intended effects, within the time allotted in a song.

The specific ways in which micro-timing of rhythm or microtonal variation of tone imbue music with “soul.”

The two types of sound mentioned by Gurdjieff in Chapter 42 of “Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson”, one being the ordinary sound we know, and another capable of altering matter, influencing health or disease, and affecting the mind; relates to John Keely’s work.

In what manner vocal inflection corresponds to musical intervals and rhythm.

Harmonic analysis of different vowels including overtone singing, and in what manner these point to different realms, archetypes, or beings that can be invoked through such sounds.

How the above may tie into three dimensional cymatic standing waves induced in the ether, which function as portal openers and/or occult sigils made of geometric vibrational patterns.

Discussion of Rudolf Steiner’s insights and observations regarding music and the soul, and Alain Daniélou meta system of music.